Popular Canadian grocery retailer plans more profitable stores with StoreSpace® Insights

We asked their Senior Store Planner, Robert Zuccaro, about why Longo’s chose StoreSpace® and how it is helping them to create and share accurate and productive store plans, quickly and easily.

Summary of main benefits that Robert identified:

• Integration with existing NielsenIQ Spaceman database ensures ‘single source of truth’
• Intuitive toolset makes it easy to drag-and-drop planograms onto category floorplans
• Accessible dashboard enables colleagues to use StoreSpace® on mobile devices in-store
• Data analytics helps optimise adjacency to maximise sales and improve customer experience.

Gaining a birds-eye view of each store

Robert has held many merchandising roles with Longo’s over the last 25 years. He is now responsible for managing the layout of the grocery, dairy and frozen sections in its 39 (soon to be 40) stores.

“We like all our store layouts to have the same look and feel, so our customers instinctively know where they can find things, even when visiting a new store for the first time.”

Streamlining stock control and optimising store layouts

The firm has used NielsenIQ (NIQ) Spaceman for many years to create planograms . “Having those planograms for individual fixtures is fantastic,” explains Robert. “They contain all the product bar codes, so we can track stock keeping units (SKUs) in and out, which makes stock control more efficient.

“However, what we really wanted was a tool that could help us manage the overall store layout, including the size and location of different category fixtures. When we heard of StoreSpace® through NIQ’s Connected Partner Program, we knew it was what we needed.”

Combining all relevant store data in the StoreSpace® portal means everyone in Longo’s retail team now works from the same data.

“NielsenIQ was only available to the planning team,” explains Robert, “whereas everyone from the shopfloor to the senior leadership team can access StoreSpace® on their preferred mobile device (phone, tablet or laptop). As our confidence in the new system has grown, so has our habit of using the direct messaging function, rather than email, for all communications.”

“These days we ask everyone to pick up their planograms and category layout changes directly from StoreSpace®. This has streamlined the planning process, making it faster and easier to share and implement changes. The next step is for store managers to sign off on changes directly in the system.”

StoreSpace® helps Longo’s manage its real estate

Consistency is a key part of the Longo’s store experience. “We use StoreSpace® every day in planning to review metrics as part of our thinking process” says Robert. “The beauty of the system is right there in its name – SPACE! It’s fantastic for seeing every aspect of each store in detail – and it is all live data.

“Just the other week, I was speaking to a store and they said they would wait for me to send through the changes. Thanks to StoreSpace® I was able to make those changes, all named and colour coded, and ping them through while they were still on the call. That’s how hands-on and immediate it is.”

“We are always looking at ways to improve our service to our store managers, but we encourage them not to change things without consulting us first. It is vital they base their decisions on the detailed knowledge in our database. For instance, we have a hierarchy of planograms, and we have data on how individual stores perform using the different hierarchies.”

“Thanks to the drag-and-drop function in the StoreSpace® AutoCAD block library, we can now easily pull different planograms into category spaces, which used to be a manual task. We can then give managers an indication of the sales they might expect from a particular combination of planograms. Although no two stores are identical in size or layout, we can use this data-driven planning process to optimise the shopping experience at individual stores and boost sales.”

Seasonal sales insights

As Robert explains, his team are still in the early stages of mining the StoreSpace® data for insights that they can share with store managers and senior leaders. “We saw right away that it could show us how the seasons affect category and product sales – whether that’s barbeque food in summer or school snacks in term time. We are now looking at how we might change the space allocated to such items throughout the year – and how it might affect our advertising and offers.”

The ability to understand the effect of product adjacency is another aspect of StoreSpace® that Robert appreciates. “We are interested in why some aisles get higher traffic than others, which includes understanding how different categories complement each other. We are looking at ways of improving the product and category mix to increase customer traffic to specific aisles.”

In fact, Robert sees performance metrics as being one of the biggest benefits to him of using StoreSpace®. “If we take on a new vendor, it’s vital to understand how much space to allocate to them – and where to find that space in the existing layout. That means looking at sales-to-space ratios to see where we might take space from underperforming categories or aisles – and the system shows us how those metrics might change as you increase or decrease space allocation.

“There are so many ways of cutting the data; for instance, we might be talking to a store manager about moving dairy into closed units. StoreSpace® can use data from our other stores to show how sales might dip at first as customers get used to the new units before going back up. That’s important for giving store managers and category managers confidence in the proposed changes.”

Integration with NIQ Spaceman

Robert was impressed with the StoreSpace® implementation process, not least the help from the team in England. “The integration with NIQ was relatively simple – we just followed the guidance from StoreSpace® and adapted certain things to make it really easy to use. The best part was working with StoreSpace® Project Manager William Hutchins, who came over to Ontario to help us. He was always asking ‘How can we help you more?’, ‘How can we make it better?’ – and, within a year, they had implemented all of our suggestions.

“It is impressive and comforting to work with people who care about their clients and express values that match our own. Their Head of Client Services, Richard Burford, was also always coming up with ways to make our life easier and showing us new ideas they were working on. He even invited me to join an online conversation with other store planning clients of theirs from around the world, which was a great learning experience.”

As Robert concludes, the implementation has not only delivered on expectations but also revealed new insights.

“StoreSpace® is now helping us with a number of things, from individual category reviews and stock management, to setting up new stores and optimising existing ones. What’s particularly pleasing is seeing how our team members are exploring and using the data from their own store to deliver the service our customers expect. We look forward to continuing to work with StoreSpace®.”

Robert Zuccaro, Senior Store Planner, Longos

Thank you, Robert, for your insights. To find out how StoreSpace^® can help your retail business optimise sales and improve customer satisfaction, please get in touch.