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TACKLING FOOD WASTE AND DRIVING UP SALES

Providing supply chain insights to help a leading UK supermarket manage inventory more efficiently, drive up sales and reduce waste.

The Challenge

Our client, a leading UK supermarket set out on an ambitious sustainability strategy, aiming to halve food waste by 2030. To help achieve this objective, the merchandise operations team focused in on the supply chain. They needed to get clear visibility of inventory moving throughout their estate, from suppliers, to distribution centres and then on to retail outlets, petrol stations, concessions as well as multiple other outlets. The challenge was to locate the data from their inventory management systems, prepare it for analysis and visualise it through Tableau, allowing planners to see trends, and receive alerts to reduce wastage as well as maximise sales.

THE SOLUTION

We collaborated with the in-house data architecture team to load existing data into a data warehouse, we developed SQL data models in Snowflake and we designed a suite of dashboards in Tableau, enabling planners to view current and historic inventory, forecasted demand, as well as planned vehicle deliveries. We also trained the merchandise operations team to develop their own dashboards, as we fully documented the end to end analytics flow, which provided a solid platform for future enhancements.

The Benefits

Halving food waste by 2030 is one of our client’s key objectives to meet stringent sustainability targets. The new dashboards provide planners the opportunity to continue on the journey to meet and even surpass these targets, by identifying trends, managing risk and being alert to any stock issues, providing them the opportunity to reduce food waste and costs as well as maximise sales. As more data attributes become available the dashboards can be further enhanced to meet a wider array of business requirements.


An absolute pleasure to have Retail Reply onboard supporting and developing the team's Tableau capabilities. Retail Reply delivered the brief on time and as required; a superb series of dashboards which are now live and supporting operators with day to day decision making. The work is of a high standard and the approach is methodical and thorough, ensuring excellent results were delivered.

Manager, Development & Delivery


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