a client success story from achieveit.com

Client: Save Mart Supermarkets Modesto, CA

Category: Retail

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Helping a Major Supermarket Stay Out Front Via Operational Excellence The phrase “Highly competitive” barely begins to describe the supermarket industry. Fast moving specialty food stores, mass merchandisers, discount chains, warehouse stores, convenience stores and online retailers are all competing with traditional players vying for share-of-market. The options make consumers highly price sensitive and less brand loyal, eroding profits in what has always been a high-volume/low-margin business.

In this environment, for a brand to succeed for decades, they must be dedicated to excellence in planning and execution across their entire operation. Without that kind of commitment, it would be tremendously difficult to deliver the operational excellence required to meet consumer expectations for keeping prices low and customer experience levels high.

Operational Excellence Helps Drive a Supermarket Success

One company that’s thrived in this space for over 60 years is Save Mart Supermarkets, of Modesto, California. This pri-vately held retailer operates 216 stores across Northern and Central California and Northern Nevada. It’s a large, distributed operation with over 16,000 employees in their Save Mart, Lucky and FoodMaxx stores, distribution centers, transportation group, and support functions.

One of the keys to their success has been their ability to design and execute against a highly efficient strategic plan year after year, says Hal Levitt, Save Mart’s Executive Director of Strategic Execution. To help make that plan work even harder, two years ago Levitt and his staff began using AchieveIt, a cloud-based Results Management System, to coordinate the design and execution of the company’s strategy across every aspect of their business.

Creating Visibility Across Departments, Geographies, and Brands

AchieveIt gives Save Mart’s managers and teams the opportunity to view all the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly performance data and activity they need to manage, starting with the earliest phases of identifying goals, and going all the way to achieving their targets.

This kind of capability would be challenging for any company, but especially so for a complex operation like Save Mart, spanning multiple locations, geogra-phies, business models and brands.

“Perhaps the most important strength of AchieveIt is its ability to give us data across all 20 of our departments so we can see how each one is progressing toward their goals,” says Levitt. “With AchieveIt, we can see in real-time how the staff and teams in all three divisions are making progress – or not – toward reach-ing goals. That by itself makes AchieveIt a significant management tool for us.”

Project Management Office Leader Frank Troglione also emphasized the impor-tance of AchieveIt’s inter-departmental, or horizontal functionality. “Our annual Operating Plan is centered on five themes. Using AchieveIt, similar objectives affecting different departments or projects and programs under separate themes can be identified and aligned. This provides a portfolio perspective to view and measure progress within a department and across departments throughout the month, quarter, year, or longer if needed.”

Save Mart operates stores under the Save Mart, Lucky, and FoodMaxx brands.

Save Mart has 216 stores across Northern and Central California and Northern Nevada.

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Working Toward Both Individual and Shared Goals

Every department at Save Mart functions as a separate unit, with its own strategic and operational goals and timelines. But while they are autonomous, each must interact and coordinate their individual goals with all the others in order for the company itself to hit their higher level targets. Coordinating that interaction is the responsibility of Save Mart’s Project Management office.

“AchieveIt lets us see and assess the cross-functional engagement among our various departments,” Troglione said. “That’s significant because it allows us to identify priorities and the availability of resources so we can shift or move them if needed and see, at a glance, the implications for all departments as they work toward their goals.” He noted this is some-thing that was much more challenging and time consuming before.

Troglione adds that another benefit is that AchieveIt provides the insight to proactively identify potential problems and course correct in real-time if needed. “It allows us to see how all the various departments are working and how they can work together more seamlessly. We can often see problems individual departments may not see on their own. Then we can alert them and check if support is needed to help solve the issue.”

The Beginning of a Collaborative Relationship

Prior to starting with AchieveIt in mid-2013, Levitt said they had not seen a single, purpose-built tool designed to help set goals, provide visibility into the planning process, and then to track and coordinate work across 20 departments, three plus brands, and 216 stores.

So they did what so many other companies still do today; relying on a variety of disconnected products, including project management tools, spread-sheets, written documents, and email. The process was time consuming and didn’t always provide the actionable insight they needed. “I knew there had to be a better way,” Levitt said.

That’s when Levitt and his team learned about AchieveIt. Which led to a relationship that’s prospered ever since.

“Hal’s team is dedicated to delivering executional excellence in a very complex business,” notes AchieveIt VP of Business Development, Joe Krause. “The more they used our product, the more they talked with us about ways to leverage it to even greater advantage. That sort of feedback is essential to us as we strive to be just as customer-centric as we know our clients are. We’re proud to have been able to leverage their input to make our latest release even more powerful. And to have such strong and insightful customers like Hal and the team at Save Mart.”

Achieving Dramatic Results

Levitt and his team echoed that sentiment, noting they’re looking forward to the end of the year when they’ll be able to benchmark the impact of the enhanced functionality across the enterprise. He also pointed out the benefits of AchieveIt’s intuitive design, saying “it’s almost like you don’t even need the training material that comes with it.”

While they haven’t yet quantified the impact of using the product, the benefits derived are quite remarkable. “I believe we’ll see a boost in efficiency and produc-tivity among the leadership in this department and many others as well,” he said. “It will save time for all departments because it will allow them to plan more efficiently, set goals effectively, and monitor progress successfully. That, by itself, will allow all staff in all departments to focus on what they do best: achieve results.”

About AchieveIt

AchieveIt is the market leader in the emerging software category of Results Management Systems (RMS). Our cloud-based platform empowers business leaders with top-to-bottom organizational visibility, coupled with the ability to coordinate people and processes. This combination enables business lead-ers to link strategy with execution, drive operational excellence, and achieve unprecedented business results.

“ With AchieveIt, we can see in real-time how the staff and teams in all three divisions are making progress—or not—toward reaching goals. That by itself makes AchieveIt a significant management tool for us.”

– Hal Levitt, Executive Director of Strategic Execution, Save Mart

Operational excellence is essential to keep prices low and customer service high.