About
Stater Bros. Markets is a regional supermarket chain headquartered in San Bernardino, California. With 170 locations, the company prides itself on providing top-tier service and maintaining a safe, customer-friendly shopping environment.
Problem
Stater Bros. faced significant challenges in loss prevention, particularly concerning internal theft, fraudulent transactions, and inefficiencies impacting profitability. Employees manipulated transaction data for high-quality meat sales, undercharging friends or themselves. Customers exploited the lack of a minimum purchase requirement for cash-back transactions, resulting in significant banking fees. Additionally, manual keying errors in departments like Florals led to inaccurate sales data and planning inefficiencies. The floral department leverages historical sales data from Agilence to better forecast their busiest sales days, like Mother's Day. They initially faced a problem with over 23,000 manually keyed entries, making accurate forecasting challenging. There were also operational inefficiencies due to inconsistent monitoring and management of product weights, leading to a substantial loss of revenue. Furthermore, effective tools were needed to assist law enforcement with investigations, enhancing store safety by solving critical cases of theft, robbery, and an increase in violent activity in their stores.
Solution
Stater Bros. turned to Agilence for a comprehensive analytics platform to address these challenges. Agilence's powerful query capabilities were used to monitor high-risk transactions and identify patterns of internal theft, particularly in the meat department. This enabled effective detection and resolution of fraudulent activities.
Additionally, Agilence’s data insights facilitated collaboration across multiple departments. For instance, working with the Finance department, Stater Bros. implemented a $5 minimum purchase policy for cash-back transactions, hoping to make substantial annual savings. The floral department, after recognizing the large amount of manually keyed entries by employees, trained employees on proper Florals scanning and used Agilence to ensure compliance with new procedures.
Operationally, Agilence helped analyze transaction data, ensuring customers received the correct product weights and reducing lost revenue from under-weighed items like bacon and deli meats. Additionally, Agilence provided crucial transaction data to law enforcement, aiding in solving critical cases involving theft and violent crimes, thereby enhancing overall store safety.
Results
The adoption of Agilence at Stater Bros. Markets has led to transformative improvements across the organization:
- Increased Detection of Internal Theft: Agilence Analytics enabled Stater Bros. to uncover multiple cases of internal fraud, particularly in the meat department where high-value items were often mispriced. Since implementing this specific report, Stater Bros has uncovered numerous cases of theft within the meat department alone. Simple queries helped identify patterns and led to admissions of guilt, saving the company thousands of dollars.
- Enhanced Cross-Department Collaboration: By working with finance, Stater Bros. used Agilence to analyze and address issues such as excessive cash-back transactions, resulting in approximately $330,000 annual savings. Additionally, the floral department also benefited from Agilence reporting to ensure compliance in scanning florals leading to a 70% reduction in hand-keyed transactions from the previous year and achieving record sales on Mother's Day.
- Improved Operational Efficiency: Through Agilence, Stater Bros. identified underweight items in the meat and deli departments, identifying approximately $400,000 in additional revenue by ensuring accurate customer transactions.
- Strengthened Law Enforcement Partnerships: Agilence’s data analytics facilitated valuable assistance to law enforcement, solving critical cases involving robbery and even aiding in the recovery of stolen items, thereby enhancing store safety.
Agilence has proven to be an invaluable tool for Stater Bros., significantly improving loss prevention efforts and driving profitability. By integrating data analytics across various departments, Stater Bros. has minimized losses, optimized operational efficiency, and demonstrated the powerful impact of data-driven decision-making. The collaboration with Agilence continues to support Stater Bros. in maintaining a safe, efficient, and customer-focused retail environment.
