Giant Eagle, Inc. has grown to be the number one supermarket retailer in the region with more than 400+ grocery and convenience stores. They are ranked among the top 40 on Forbes magazine’s largest private corporations list as one of the nation’s largest food, fuel, and pharmacy retailers with approximately $11 billion in annual sales.
Business Challenges
- Legacy EPM Solution Architecture Design – Inconsistent dimensionality across applications. “Uniform” hierarchies required long drill paths and poor usability. Weekly data for all accounts resulting in system performance degradation.
- Data Management and Integration – Sub-optimal design causing data load errors, significant rework, delays, manual intervention, and end-user frustration. COA maintenance outside of EPM requiring additional process steps and system update jobs.
- Planning and Forecasting – Weekly and monthly planning activities intermixed together. Confusing, non-intuitive data forms. Unnecessary products and accounts. Misalignment between AOP and Forecast processes. Error-prone data loads from offline files.
- Reporting and Analysis – Manually intensive, non-standard, Excel-centric reporting. Herculean efforts to produce monthly reporting packages. Data reconciliation challenges for actuals loaded to existing planning and reporting applications.
Solution
- Strategic Assessment – Conducted short-cycle assessment to understand and document pain points and improvement opportunities with prior solution, provided best practice functional and technical recommendations, and detailed an implementation plan for success.
- Oracle EPM Solution Architecture – Purpose-built models for weekly planning (Sales, Margin, Labor, Shrink, Inventory), monthly planning (balance of P&L), and reporting. Enterprise solution spanning Grocery, C-Store, Wholesale, and Corporate business units.
- Streamlined and Enhanced Planning Capabilities – Driver-based planning for key P&L areas including Sales, Margin, and Labor across Grocery, RX, and C-Store business units. Simplified flex form enabled process for loading offline AOP and Forecast data.
- Reporting and Analysis – Purpose-built reporting models supporting weekly margin and inventory reporting and monthly P&L reporting
and analysis. Automated standard report sets by BU with robust ad hoc analysis. Advanced analytic capabilities with Store Attributes.
Impact
- Integrated Business Planning – Best practice based AOP and Forecasting processes with streamlined, optimized weekly and monthly planning activities. Enabled future use rolling forecast and store allocation capabilities.
- End-User Experience – Intuitive data input forms and planning hierarchies optimally aligned to the weekly/monthly planning and reporting processes. Significantly improved calculation, aggregation, and reporting refresh times (3x reduction).
- Data Integration – “One click” weekly actuals updates in 2+ minutes vs. prior three-day multi-step process. 4.5x cycle time reduction in monthly ERP actuals data load cycle times. “On demand” data loads during Financial Close for real-time reporting.
- Solution Usability, Admin, and Support – Simplified, streamlined solution administration. 225% reduction in substitution variables. Turnkey metadata management with direct COA maintenance. Monthly solution support hours reduced by ~75%.
