Replacing a Legacy System to Improve Efficiency

The Golub Corporation, parent of Price Chopper and Market 32, exists to help people feed and care for themselves and their families. They are an innovative retailer of products and services and recognize that consistently satisfying their customers is key to their success. Price Chopper is committed to serving their customers, teammates, communities, and shareholders.

In early 2014, Price Chopper’s Asset Protection Department was looking at ways to enhance reporting analytics, but getting in their way was a legacy exception reporting tool. Even though everyone was familiar with its functionality, this legacy system forced their team to manually manipulate data and put an unnecessary added workload on IT resources. The Price Chopper team knew that if they wanted to transform their department into a best-in-class organization, they needed a new analytics solution, and that is how their search led them to Agilence.

The Asset Protection Analytics team, led by Mike Gulli at the time, needed an analytics solution that was more efficient and agile in an ever-changing retail world. The exception reporting solution their department had in place was difficult to use, had limited functionality, and was holding their efforts back.

The team at Price Chopper was stuck using reports supplied by their legacy exception reporting tool that only analyzed previously known areas of loss. If a new issue arose, they would have to manually manipulate the data to find who or what was at fault. “With our old application, it was difficult to identify the cause and who or what was contributing to the loss,” said Gulli. “We needed a solution that could help us easily find and resolve the root causes of loss.” The lack of functionality and dated interface of their old solution led to more time spent on mining data and less time on improving the business.

For Price Chopper’s Asset Protection Department to continue to evolve and advance their efforts, they required a data analytics solution that could easily grow and adapt with them, allow their IT team to focus on core organizational tasks, and most of all improve their department’s efficiency and performance.

The search led Price Chopper to Agilence. Agilence ticked all of the boxes and even provided functionality that went beyond their expectations. When it came to the Asset Protection team’s use of the application, not only did Agilence help them become more efficient in their daily tasks, but it did the legwork of the analytics for them, eliminating the need to manually assess data and allowing the team to focus on solutions and results.

Agilence also greatly reduced the IT team’s support efforts by allowing Asset Protection to easily create and distribute complex reports and queries on their own using the built-in drag-and-drop builder, as well as easing the burden of maintaining critical infrastructure to run the application thanks to Agilence’s SaaS deployment method.

The results of switching to Agilence were almost instant, as the Asset Protection team became more efficient at identifying and correcting issues. During the first year of use, their team became significantly more efficient at isolating and resolving root causes of loss. In the words of Gulli, now Manager of Corporate Security & Crisis Management at Price Chopper, “Our team became far more efficient at identifying and correcting issues. Agilence allows us to focus on resolving root causes of loss, not just individual cases.”

The success that Asset Protection has seen with Agilence has spread to other departments within the organization as well. Today there are over 500 active users of the data analytics application from multiple departments including Legal, Internal Audit, Store Front End, and the Operations Field Team. Some of these departments have adopted Agilence to replace their own internal software solutions. The Front End team is responsible for monitoring and balancing daily POS activities such as refunds, coupon usage, postage stamp purchases, and charitable donations. To do this they used to use a homegrown solution, but when the Asset Protection team introduced them to Agilence, they decided to replace their own solution with the one from Agilence.

Price Chopper/Market 32’s Director of Asset Protection, Scott Ziter added, “the implementation of Agilence has allowed us to become more effective and agile as a department. This allows us to remain ahead of the curve in the ever-changing and always competitive grocery segment.”