Aptean > Case Studies > Aptean Helps NorgesGruppen Grow Market-Leading Retail Business

Aptean Helps NorgesGruppen Grow Market-Leading Retail Business

Company Size

1,000+

Region

Europe

Country

Norway

Product

IMI Supply Chain

Tech Stack

Not mentioned

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Functional Applications - Inventory Management Systems
Functional Applications - Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)

Applicable Industries

Retail

Applicable Functions

Logistics & Transportation
Warehouse & Inventory Management

Use Cases

Inventory Management
Supply Chain Visibility

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

NorgesGruppen is a privately held grocery retailer that defined a strategy to expand its business into a position as market leader in wholesale and retail in Norway. The retail operation serves 2600 sales outlets and includes many well-known store chains. The wholesale operation is a company group (ASKO) that serves these as well as other independent shops, gas stations and food service operations. The product categories range from fresh and frozen food to general merchandise and auto supplies. NorgesGruppen has a supply chain strategy to deliver all products via its own distribution network to ensure leading efficiency and effectiveness, providing consistent service and quality both in products and information.

The Challenge

NorgesGruppen, a privately held grocery retailer, aimed to expand its business into a position as market leader in wholesale and retail in Norway. The company faced several challenges including high costs for growing business volumes, limitations in capacity and quality that drove the need to redesign the supply chain, inadequate systems for future state, and new product categories adding new requirements. The company was formed by acquiring several regional retail and wholesale companies. The new group structure includes common corporate-level functions for purchasing and logistics, but also continued operation of regional companies with full profit-and-loss responsibility for sales and operations. With this followed internal sales and purchasing transactions that needed to be automated as far as possible. At the same time, NorgesGruppen wanted to create a single face to all customers and stores with access to the same services and assortment.

The Solution

NorgesGruppen decided on a best-of-breed strategy, and selected the IMI Supply Chain suite with its order, inventory and warehouse management modules as the heart of the solution. The solution was rolled out using a phased approach during 2003-2004 (site-by-site), followed by a full upgrade of the solution across all sites in 2007. The key requirements on the system were to provide high-volume transaction capabilities, allow the right flexibility to support the new supply chain design with multi-channel sales, sourcing and distribution, and to support a service-orient integration model. IMI Supply Chain has made it possible to define corporate level processes for managing suppliers, products, prices and channels, while at the same time allowing local market and warehouse profiling— running all companies in a single system instance.

Operational Impact

The new logistics network meant several structural changes that helped grow revenues and still reduce costs. Decisions regarding when and where to stock products are made on corporate level, and allows NorgesGruppen to optimize inventory and deliver based on the combined properties of products and customers.
One important objective for NorgesGruppen was to create a corporate view of all business processes. With the decision to keep a company structure with several legal entities this could have been a challenge of magnitude. But IMI Supply Chain has made it possible to define corporate level processes for managing suppliers, products, prices and channels, while at the same time allowing local market and warehouse profiling— running all companies in a single system instance.
In the daily operation, the new solution has helped NorgesGruppen benefit both from increased automation in collaboration with trading partners, and from optimized and paperless production in logistics execution.
NorgesGruppen continues to expand the business by adding new product categories to its assortment.

Quantitative Benefit

Increased delivery quality with reduced cost per distributed unit
Decreased inventory levels by intelligent coordination of supply and demand with increased customer service
Integrated and automated business processes with suppliers and customers and stores
Supporting business expansion with new product categories and doubled transaction volumes since go live
Outstanding system stability and performance