SAP announces SAP Replenishment Planning application, a new SAP for Retail solution, developed in collaboration with one of Switzerland’s largest retail and wholesale companies, the Coop Group (Coop).
According to SAP, the SAP Replenishment Planning solution is being showcased at the virtual ‘NRF 2021: Retail’s Big Show Chapter One‘ where leading professionals and experts from the retail industry gather to exchange visionary ideas, build partnerships and experience new technologies.
The co-innovated retail management solution is an add-on application focused on fresh product replenishment planning. The SAP for Retail solution aims to help retail business customers reduce cost and enhance the customer experience with intelligent replenishment strategies using artificial intelligence (AI).
Thomas Vielhauer, Coop’s head of IT merchandise management processes, explains the company’s motivation for collaborating with SAP for Retail:
“As part of a larger vision to improve business processes and, above all, ensure customer satisfaction, we partnered with SAP for retail replenishment and forecasting. By integrating intelligent technologies into our promotion and replenishment processes, we’re able to stock accurate quantities. That means customers get the products they need and the fresh quality they expect.”
SAP for Retail: Tackling Food Waste
According to the United Nations Organisation, the global COVID-19 pandemic has brought about “a global wake-up on the need to transform and rebalance the way our food is produced and consumed.”
To help address the new challenges in food waste brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and contribute to sustainable supply chains, SAP for Retail and Coop developed the AI-based SAP Replenishment Planning to support precise demand prediction. The solution’s capabilities include:
- replenishment configuration
- replenishment planning
- replenishment simulation
- replenishment alert management
These automated capabilities enable retailers to eliminate over-stocks and stock-outs. With the SAP Replenishment Planning application, retailer companies can now effectively replenish goods based on the changing demand history of each product and store.
SAP accentuates how this new solution offers retailers a holistic approach to best-optimise order amounts for every store skew combination in their retail management systems. According to SAP, this capability provides “the lowest expected costs under consideration of forecast distribution and product-specific replenishment requirements such as shelf life or shelf capacity.”
About SAP
SAP SE is a German multinational software corporation based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, that develops enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations.
SAP is considered the market leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: 77{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd} of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system. SAP’s machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers’ businesses into intelligent enterprises. Its end-to-end suite of applications and services enables customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference.
About the Coop Group
Coop is one of Switzerland’s largest retailers. The firm was awarded by the independent German rating agency, Oekom Research, with the title of “World’s Most Sustainable Retailer.”
Coop is structured in the form of a cooperative society with around 2.5 million members.
Coop operates 2,478 shops and employs more than 90,000 people in Switzerland. The retail group accounts for half of all the organic food sold in Switzerland.
