This article first appeared in Retail Merchandiser magazine www.retail-merchandiser.com.

Speed to (Set) Shelf - Part 1 of 3

How Chicago area grocer Strack & Van Til set its newly acquired stores in half the time.

Responsible for bringing eight new supermarkets online within a well-defined 14-week window, Dave De Both, director of shelf management for Strack & Van Til, an independent chain with 29 stores in northwest Indiana and suburban Chicago, was confident that his team could deliver.

Still, he didn’t want a slow store set to get in the way of the dozens of other items on his plate and a suggestion about a way to cut in half the time required to set a new store for the bare shelves up caught his attention.

In late 2006, the fast-growing regional retailer, which operates under the Strack & Van Til, Ultra Foods, Town & Country Markets and K Markets banners, acquired eight new Chicago-area locations, seven of which formerly housed Cub Stores and one of which had been a Dominick’s site.

“We are always looking for opportunities to expand,” De Both says. “These eight buildings were vacant except for the equipment, and we were able to do some remodeling, re-align the shelving and adjust some aisles to fit our format.”

“We had been using Gladson Interactive’s space management product database to populate our planograms, and we heard that their QuickSet Image Reset Strips and Back Tags could help us save quite a bit of time on the store sets”, De Both remembers.

Still something of a skeptic, De Both agreed to try the Gladson merchandising tool on one store. The results couldn’t have been better and he quickly rolled the process into the remaining seven stores.

According to De Both, a traditional store set, with manufacturer’s sales people and merchandising reps filling the shelves based on planogram outputs, generally required more than four weeks to complete. “Not only was this slow and somewhat hectic, but there were always errors that needed to be corrected,” he notes.

Using the Quickset reset tools, the Strack & Van Til team cut set-up time to about two and half weeks per store, with virtually no significant errors.

De Both was responsible primarily for the center store, including dairy and frozen, which represented about 2,400 linear feet of gondolas, often with four or five shelves per gondola. “In the past it would take us up to three weeks to set the center store,” he said. “We were able to cut that to just over one week.”

The QuickSet strips included the product image and its size, the unit of measurement, the Strack & Van Til order number and the number of facings allotted for each time. The strips are designed to be inserted into the shelf price channel, though the Strack & Van Til team simply taped the strips above the shelf.

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