Rina Janine Go, Chief Merchandising, Marketing, and Distribution Officer for Prince Retail, sat down to talk about how RELEX has helped them automate processes and drive forecast accuracy to support their journey of rapid growth in the Philippines, driving customer experience and high service across remote locations.
Transcript:
I’m Rina. I’m the Chief Merchandising, Marketing, and Distribution Officer for Prince Retail. Prince Retail is a homegrown retailer out of Cebu City from the Philippines. We are unique in terms of retailing because we cater mostly to underserved and base-of-the-pyramid customers. The challenges that RELEX was able to help us overcome: One would be how we are looking at the same set of data wherein we’re all looking at the same inventories,
We’re all looking at the same replenishment parameters. Because every store, every supplier, and every scenario has a different constraint. So, there was a lot of confusion, and there was a lot of disagreement about how much stock we needed at the stores and how to serve our customers properly. Basically, it was mostly on Excel and manual papers, and even calculators for certain products and for certain stores.
So that’s how – that was how manual we were. And it became more and more difficult as we continue to expand and our stores got farther and farther, and farther from the city centers. When we found RELEX and started talking to RELEX, they pretty much ticked off all the boxes and more. They were able to tell us, “Not only can we help with the scenario, but have you thought of this, this, and this?”
And we realized that we weren’t even looking about – looking at the situation from a 360-degree angle. We were just looking at the problem that was already happening without foreseeing that, as we continue to expand, as we go out to farther and farther areas, we would encounter more complex scenarios and issues.
And when we saw RELEX’s solution, we realized that it would help us prepare for the future while already solving the problems and the scenarios were already encountering today. And we immediately felt that “Wow, this solution really understands what a retailer feels like,” because down to the most specific scenarios, they had already thought of it. And it really helped that RELEX resolved this challenge of having so many different data points coming from everywhere and then centralizing it to be all seen in RELEX.
And we were able to understand, “Oh, this is why we need to do this, because the forecast is telling us this.” And then, we discuss the forecast and how we can continue to refine it and help it improve so that we can get better replenishment numbers. RELEX was able to help us find stability and find a sort of more guided forecast and replenishment for us to continue to grow, for us to continue to expand despite all the constraints that everyone, all the retailers in the world, are facing today.
RELEX was able to adapt, and we’re able to work with the RELEX team, who help us always on this adoption journey as we continue to use RELEX, not only for our existing stores but as we continue to aggressively expand all around the country to reach even farther and farther provinces and rural areas. And we’re very happy and proud to be a partner of RELEX, to be working with RELEX here from this corner of the world because it shows how strong and how great this kind of AI-driven or machine learning – machine learning-driven tool can really help retailers like us.
We have strong solutions backing us, one of which is RELEX, and we’re very happy to continue working with them as we continue on this journey of serving the underserved.
