Give Them What They Want

If there is one thing Brookshire Grocery wants to be known for, it is superior customer service. Starting in 1928, when it opened a 25 x 100 ft. supermarket on the downtown square in Tyler, Texas, Brookshire has built its reputation on providing high-level attention to its customers. The company even has a formal name for the process: “Legendary Customer Service.”

Now with more than 150 locations, the regional retailer believes it is carrying on that legacy thanks to a dramatic business transformation during the mid-2000s that sought to position it competitively for the future.

“We changed the organizational structure from the top down,” says John D’Anna, Brookshire’s vice president of information technology planning and strategy. “We put new departments in place. We changed people’s jobs. We changed everybody’s roles and responsibilities, and we gave them new technology.”

Not only did the company power up new IT systems in collaboration with SAP, Brookshire also changed how the company would approach technology going forward – all with the proviso that the ultimate outcome would be to better serve its customers through a category-management retail approach.

The company maintains “a lot of loyalty information in our systems,” D’Anna says. “We felt like we could get to customer-centric category management pretty quickly if we had the right infrastructure in place.”

Brookshire operates in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi under four banners: Brookshire’s Food Stores (full-service supermarkets); Super 1 Foods (upscale warehouse-style stores); Olé Foods (stores targeting Hispanic consumers); and ALPS, or Always Low Price Store (discount-store format). The chain operates three distribution facilities totaling more than 2 million sq. ft., its own fleet of tractor-trailer rigs and manufacturing facilities that turn out products in the bakery, dairy and water categories.

Technology was a key area for improvement as Brookshire began the process of remaking itself. A consultant had labeled the company’s use of technology a corporate weakness, leading to a year-long selection process for a strategic partner to provide the foundation for enterprise resource planning.

Brookshire was stymied by disparate legacy systems that slowed internal processes, poor reporting capabilities that handcuffed the flow of strategic information to support decisions and multiple data feeds amounting to what consultants refer to as “multiple versions of truth” about what is occurring within corporate walls.

“A lot of times retailers build their business processes around applications” like those for store operation, replenishment, merchandising and warehousing, says Randy Evins, an SAP principal in the food, drug and convenience segment working with Brookshire. “Subsequently, if you’ve got a bunch of point solutions, the business processes, and visibility into what is going on with the application itself, cause retailers to lack end-to-end clarity.”

Brookshire’s IT enterprise suffered such a malaise, with business processes wrapped around those applications to create “invisible roadblocks that don’t allow upstream and downstream information flow to influence” decisions, Evins says. In such scenarios, if an organization’s inventory managers bring supply chain software online to improve inventory decision-making, access to the data is unlikely to be readily available to other parts of the business, he adds.

But as D’Anna knew, it is one thing to refresh your IT enterprise with new hardware and software, and quite another to execute on those enhancements. The company’s internal perception of its IT processes was that of a “necessary evil.”