Alnatura Freshens Product Placements in Its Stores with Blue Yonder

Productivity & EnablementProduct Management

By STS News Desk On Aug 12, 2021

Alnatura Freshens Product Placements in Its Stores with Blue Yonder

For Alnatura, an organic supermarket chain based in Germany, meeting the local requirements for each of its stores was the key reason the company chose to implement Blue Yonder’s space & floor planning solution. The solution, which includes Blue Yonder’s Planogram Generator, allows Alnatura to build store-specific planograms aligned with consumer needs, which helps reduce unnecessary inventory.

Implementing @BlueYonder store specific planograms @Alnatura increased revenue by 4% in the fresh assortment and decreased out-of-stocks by 6%

Founded in 1984, Alnatura operates 139 supermarkets in 65 cities across Germany. The company offers 6,000 products in its stores, including over 1,300 different organic foods produced under the Alnatura brand sold both in its organic markets and in 12,700 trading partner branches across Europe. The grocer needed to drive more automation and increase efficiency for its stores, which each had different local shopper preferences and challenges with temporary stock-outs and space constraints. The company turned to its trusted supply chain provider, Blue Yonder, to address these challenges.

With Blue Yonder, Alnatura has been able to:

Implement store specific planograms that consider the available space, and the local conditions, to ensure the right product on the right shelf at the right store, enabling a process to automatically add regional/local products where applicable, and decreasing out-of-stocks by 6%.
Increase revenue by 4% in the fresh assortment resonating from store specific planograms and changes in the assortment.
Empower category managers and space planners to work in collaboration – and with transparency – resulting in better store performance.
Introduce a connected category review process to optimize store offerings and shelf executions. Shelf execution has increased by approximately 30%.
Lower overstocks by approximately 29%, opening space in the backroom to allow for the addition of regional/local products.

“We chose Blue Yonder because customer centricity is a key driver for our daily operation and business. With this solution, we have now established a process to support the local needs of shoppers while improving our planogram planning efficiency and increasing store adoption of planograms by 30%. We look forward to further expanding our relationship with Blue Yonder in the future as we continue to transform our stores and operations,” said Manuel Canella, category manager, Alnatura.

Alnatura currently uses Blue Yonder’s category management solution for its stores and recently expanded the use of the solution to its wholesale business. Now, its B2B customers that sell Alnatura-branded products have the same space & floor planning and planogramming capabilities to strategically place Alnatura’s products in their stores.

Combined, Blue Yonder’s category management and space & floor planning solutions have allowed Alnatura to make more accurate space allocation decisions. By leveraging customer insights and robust analytics, the company can now maximize the productivity of available selling-space to drive revenue growth. Part of Blue Yonder’s Luminate™ Commerce portfolio, the solutions seamlessly integrate to planograms, streamlining the design and implementation of each store’s floor plan to maximize category space allocation and sales opportunities.

“Category management is the heart of all retail processes, so it was key for Alnatura to implement an integrated planogram solution that allowed each store to meet its unique, local needs,” said Johan Reventberg, EMEA president, Blue Yonder. “Now, Alnatura is able to build and maintain store-specific planograms to drive better efficiency for its planners and staff, as well as meet the changing needs of its customers.”

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.