Enhanced supply chain and financial planning through integrated intelligence at Sogegross

• The Sogegross Group is among Italy's top ten private groups in the large-scale retail sector. Headquartered in Genoa, it is active in most Central and Northern Italian regions. The group's presence focuses chiefly on the brands:
• Sogegross and Grosmarket (cash & carry channel)
• Basko (supermarkets and superstores) and its e-commerce channel www.laspesabasko.it
• Ekom (food discount)
• DORO supermarkets (supermarkets and superette franchises)
• Primia and Q Maiuscola (two private label brands within the group).

The challenge: Supporting a complex supply chain

One of Sogegross’ strengths is managing its distribution and logistics chain to serve the other brands in the group. They have seven platforms dedicated to specific types of products:

• fresh food
• fruit and vegetables
• fish
• meat
• dry and fresh discounters
• food (packaged)
• frozen.

Combined, they see more than 65,000 tons of fresh products and more than 33,000,000 boxes of packaged products move through the chain every year. Discussing this, Marco Staiti, ICT Manager for Sogegross, recalls:

“We were aware that, in addition to offering classic services such as the supply of solutions that target specific needs, very few software vendors could also provide more advanced services. These include ad hoc dashboards and relevant alerts, based on in-depth analysis designed to prevent critical issues and incompatibilities.”

The project: Extending intelligence to drive better outcomes

Sogegross widely uses the Board Intelligent Planning Platform across its key business functions and processes. These include:

Financial Planning & Analysis:

• financial budgeting and forecasting
• management control
• analysis of variances against the budget for cash & carry
• annual budget with quarterly revisions
• reporting

Anti-fraud measurement

• cashed-in vs. deposited daily monitoring
• cash-barrier data control

Purchasing

• analysis of suppliers' and buyers’ performances by area, department, product, and category
• product returns monitoring

Sales and marketing

• analysis of sales for cash & carry
• supermarket sales dashboarding
• marketing intelligence (effect of promotions on sales and margins)
• management of all aspects of the cash & carry's marketing department

Logistics

• rolling forecast for logistics and cash & carry
• inventory reconciliations
• management of the distribution centers in terms of inventory movements
• transportation monitoring (e.g., vehicle saturation and back-order packages) and impact of transport on revenue

Human Resources

• workforce analysis (worked hours, workable hours, absenteeism, etc.)
• performance management

IT services 

• weekly monitoring of ERP hard disks’ capacities

The benefits: Empowering IT and the business with an Intelligent Planning Platform

Sogegross can now match business users' needs, coming from different job functions, with the related IT requirements across the entire supply chain and finance and translate them into core shared objectives: Marco Staiti adds:

“Board is an ideal tool that addresses specific business issues through ad hoc reports while allowing access to a single database under standardized control. This approach draws on the specific skills of everyone and results in overall improvement and job satisfaction.”

Key benefits from the project include:

IT resource optimization

Each week, Sogegross can quickly verify peaks of HW/Services so the IT Department can adjust the ERP’s functioning based on the best distribution of disk space across the company.

Reporting acceleration

Sogegross has also improved the efficiency of reporting creation. For example, generating a monthly report for the purchasing department previously required two working days. Now Sogegross creates a daily report in four seconds flat. Additionally, the time required to produce weekly sales reports for management has fallen from hours to just one immediate click. Summarizing these vital enhancements at Sogegross, Marco Staiti concludes:

“Once fully implemented in our organization, Board has demonstrated a surprising ability to generate effective solutions within extremely short time frames. After experiencing this value of the Intelligent Planning Platform, we have been further impressed by the ease we can integrate Board into other software systems. For example, Board is now fully integrated with our retail merchandising system.”

Cost reduction

The cost of developing detailed reports has reduced by 30-35%, thanks to Board’s self-service approach.

Availability of the supplier

Sogegross also praised the ungrudging willingness of Board’s expert teams to help them:

“When the need arise, we receive prompt answers not only from the support team but also directly from professional services team”.