By implementing our StoreSpace® software integrated with NielsenIQ planograms, Dominican Republic grocery retailer increased productivity by optimising its retail planning process
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StoreSpace® is enabling Grupo Ramos to improve store performance with a thorough understanding of the space in store. The software is also helping drive productivity improvements enabling internal and external teams to collaborate efficiently using optimized processes and AutoCAD planning tools.
Grupo Ramos caters for 60 million shopper visits each year through its 70 stores across the Dominican Republic including supermarkets, discount stores under the La Sirena and Aprezio brands.
Since 2017 the retailer has undertaken a major project to create a world-class operation by aligning processes across the business to ensure the efficient use of resources.
Early in 2021 Grupo Ramos decided to implement the NielsenIQ recommended StoreSpace® macro solution to improve the overall efficiency and profitability of its estate. This included improving sales and profitability with less space in store to facilitate the installation of rental concessions.
Undertaken during the pandemic, the initial discovery sessions were conducted over a two-week period via Microsoft Teams.
During this phase CADS’ Customer Success Specialist, Richard Burford, gained a thorough understanding of Grupo Ramos’ existing business processes influencing store layout and merchandising; as well as reviewing the quality and accuracy of the retailers existing AutoCAD floor plans and NielsenIQ Spaceman planograms.
Alejandro Bennasar, Grupo Ramos’ Leader of Space Planning and Merchandising Management explains,
“The discovery process was very comprehensive. We discussed our internal processes in detail and did a good job from the very start. CADS understood perfectly what we needed and were looking forward to gaining with StoreSpace®. While the three-way partnership, CADS, NielsenIQ and Grupo Ramos worked well. We conducted most sessions in English with any technical language translated into Spanish by our Nielsen representative.”
As a result of the discovery phase CADS was able to adapt the implementation and training to ensure Grupo Ramos was able to use StoreSpace® easily using the newly defined processes.
We are now taking a disciplined approach to remodelling our stores, we are prioritising the less profitable stores first and StoreSpace® is helping make them profitable again. We know that everything within our floorplans and planograms are correct because everyone is working from the same information. So far we are very happy with StoreSpace® and everything is working with the process.
The next stage was to understand the quality of existing data, as Richard goes onto explain:
“To ensure that Grupo Ramos had confidence in the accuracy of the existing store plans, we worked together to map out exactly what was in the pilot store. Together we identified that there were more fixtures in store than were on the plans, leading to planning decisions based on inaccurate data. This wasn’t known prior to this data migration exercise for StoreSpace®.”
Part of the confusion was caused through the store specific nature of the planogram structure and the duplication of planograms to deal with multiple sides of an aisle. These instances have now been condensed into a single planogram, massively reducing the number of planograms maintained within the hierarchy.
The Discovery phase also resulted in the creation of a single StoreSpace® AutoCAD fixture library and defined CAD standards. The library has been shared with Grupo Ramos’ five external architectural teams to be used when designing the initial floor plans to fixture level. The architect’s plans are then handed over to the macro space planner to allocate categories to the fixtures using the model store feature within StoreSpace®, which makes it much faster to design new stores based on the defined optimal category space.
Once the category space layouts have been signed off by the leadership team, planograms can be assigned to the floorplan with any required planograms created by the eight members of the space planning team. Knowing the exact dimensions – heights, widths and depths – of the associated fixtures, means the planners can build the planograms with confidence, that they will fit the equipment when delivered in store ensuring there are no errors requiring rework across the teams involved.
As a result every planogram now has its correct space in store and can be reported on together with the associated linear space, sales and profit data. This includes the fashion and home décor departments that do not use planograms, but can still be planned and reported on through StoreSpace® using non-merchandisable planograms placed using StoreSpace®.
Alejandro concludes,
“We are now taking a disciplined approach to remodelling our stores, we are prioritising the less profitable stores first and StoreSpace® is helping make them profitable again.
We know that everything within our floorplans and planograms are correct because everyone is working from the same information. So far we are very happy with StoreSpace® and everything is working with the process.
StoreSpaceOnline is a very friendly tool, we have it on our phones, we have it on the computer, we have it everywhere! And the support is great too. I have worked with many software companies, and CADS’ StoreSpace® support is the best that I have used in the last 20 years.”
If you want to know more about how StoreSpace® can help improve the profitability of your stores, talk to our experts or request a demo today.
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