Unleashing Category Management Potential to Maximize Profits and Growth

The client is a $1.75B, multi-regional, specialty grocery retailer, focused on high-quality fresh food, offered in a differentiated, high-touch shopping experience. Facing the rapidly changing demands and challenges of a pandemic-influenced market, coupled with the desire for continued growth, company leadership recognized the need to standardize and streamline processes, identify gaps in category management capabilities, as well as understand options to better align its merchant organization to support new ways of operating.​

The goal was to be more efficient and to improve the ability to react more quickly and effectively to customer needs.

Parker Avery engaged in a rapid assessment focused on a close examination of merchandising processes, roles & responsibilities, and supporting tools. The project scope included annual planning, in-season forecasting, promotional/ad planning, and supply chain operations.​

The Parker Avery team worked closely with company stakeholders, performing a comprehensive current-state analysis and then comparing the results to best practices and leading category management capabilities based on the firm’s deep retail and grocery experience.​

Key activities and deliverables included:

• Category management current state assessment and gap analysis
• Future-state process design
• Organizational design and role/responsibility development
• Demand forecasting pilot
• Overall organizational change services tailored for a retailer

After defining the necessary process, tool, and organizational changes, Parker Avery outlined a detailed, prioritized, and actionable roadmap to guide the client through specific changes required to achieve a more consistent and efficient future state and to support the organization’s strategic objectives.