Alison Herrera, Giant Tiger Supply Chain Systems Optimization Manager, shares insights into how they have streamlined their inventory planning with RELEX to reduce inventory and increase efficiency from DCs to stores. Giant Tiger Stores Limited is Canada’s leading family discount retailer, with more than 260 stores across eight provinces.
Transcript:
My name is Alison Herrera. I work at Giant Tiger Stores Ltd, and I’m the Supply Chain Systems Optimization Manager. Giant Tiger is a Canadian retailer. We sell fashion, grocery, and home goods. We’ve been around since 1961. We now have 268 stores across Alberta to P.E.I.. We have five distribution centers and most of our stores get between 3 to 6 deliveries a week.
All our Giant Tiger stores are franchised, so the owners and managers really have a lot of control over what they bring in. There’s also a lot of involvement in the communities, so there’s a lot of regional selling of products, which is great for the consumers and the stores, but it’s a lot more challenging for the analysts to try to deal with those unknowns.
Some of the benefits we were looking for was really just to have improved safety stock and reduce that inventory in the DCs as well as the stores. And have information for our vendors, our lead times, and our minimums in one spot versus all over the place. And just have a consistent training approach for all the analysts so they’re all doing the same job with the same type of results. Also, to increase our in-stock and really reduce that spoilage down versus us having to guess in the past what we were trying to be ordering for.
So, the implementation and the timing was great. High level, we came under budget and on time with the project. So, we started with the design session and the discovery session and a lot of data validation.
So, there was a pretty small group from the GT side, but the project team we worked with at RELEX was great. I was the only superuser on the project, so working with that project team and the two dedicated people that were there were, were amazing and gave me a lot of knowledge.
So, one of the reasons we chose RELEX as a partner to work with us was because of their experience within grocery and especially in fresh, knowing we were going to get to fresh.
We also wanted just a single system to be able to house information and integrate between the DCs and the stores as well as our different departments. So, between fresh grocery, home goods, fashion – especially with all of those different lead times – so just integrating it all together. The lead consultant on the project spent a lot of time with me.
We did a lot of one on one, walking through the dashboard creations, the data validation. Really doing the data validation was super helpful to understand how everything from our ERP just moved over to RELEX. Working with RELEX on the day-to-day has been great. So the project team was really great to work with the continuous service and the support as well.
We have a lot of flexibility in the design and what we need to do to just talk through things how we want to actually accomplish something at the end of the day. So this is the flexibility and the adaptability of the software has been great. The reaction from the stores has been great. Mostly it’s been seamless for them, which is essentially what we wanted.
But we’re seeing better end results, which is really what we wanted at the end of the day. So, they’re seeing increased availability with reduced inventory and just stock where they needed to be at the right time. So, I think the biggest value that RELEX has brought, really for me personally, is just having all the exceptions in one place and having everything centralized. And having that really all together to go to the teams to say this is where you need to address something has been very, very beneficial to us.
It helps streamline processes and just makes things a lot more improved.
