Food Markets/ Retail

The Customer is a large supermarket chain operating over 1,000 retail food supermarkets across the Southern United States and acting as a distributor for all of its stores.

Store managers and buyers were burdened by a laborious ordering process, which had them relying on a large number of paper catalogs in order to place orders and restock inventory from their vendors. In addition to being a generally outdated and inefficient process, managers and buyers were missing visibility into their current and pending order status and also lacked modern cybersecurity protections because of the open perimeter necessary to allow communication between numerous vendors. All in all, the Customer believed the absence of a marketplace was contributing to organizational inefficiencies and hurting their reorder revenues.

The Customer engaged Aleran to create a marketplace which would enable them, as a single buyer, to gain efficiency, security and control over their ordering process by having multiple brands, manufacturers, and suppliers selling into a multi-vendor, B2B buying portal. Participating marketplace suppliers would benefit by having the opportunity to expose all of their buyers to their products, greatly expanding their reach and reducing their costs. For store buyers, the marketplace would give access to an unlimited number of supplier products in one, location — eliminating the need to place individual orders on different supplier websites or via traditional, paper transactions and generally streamlining the buying process for the retailer.

Store managers and buyers began using the single centralized ordering system, virtually eliminating paper-based orders and gaining complete visibility and control over their real-time and pending orders. The marketplace also gave store buyers more independence, allowing them to place inventory replenishment orders quickly and easily, while giving HQ more insight into product ordering patterns across their many locations and stores.