Technology

Regional grocer Rouses Enterprises LLC has renewed the service contract for the Revionics Price Optimization solution for another year, and will roll out the provider’s pricing solutions in the new stores it will be adding in 2011.

Over the past two years, Thibodaux, La.-based Rouses has successfully used Price Optimization’s everyday planning capabilities to implement and tune the grocer’s pricing strategy, which included improving its competitive edge without affecting gross margins.

“The speed, transparency, flexibility and ease of use of Revionics’ solutions allows us to quickly adapt to our customers’ shopping needs, wants and patterns in a confident, strategic way,” said Malcom Landry, director of administration for Rouses, which operates 36 stores in Louisiana and Mississippi. “Investing in solutions that drive customer satisfaction is how we continue to succeed and grow. Revionics has become a key partner to our progress.”

Rouses depends on Revionics solutions to enhance retail performance in several ways:

• The grocer uses everyday price planning to model strategies and optimize its key value items (KVIs). Using Revionics’ real-time “what if” solutions, Rouses compares the results of different price strategies to make fact-based decisions.
• Rouses fine-tunes its pricing decisions to adapt to shopper insight using Revionics' unique weekly reoptimization capability.
• Transparency into the “why and how” behind price recommendations and scenario-planning results has enabled Rouses to be confident in pricing strategies and rapidly adopt recommendations that have had positive results.
• The rollout of the new pricing strategy and associated price recommendations across products and stores has led to higher same-store sales and improved gross margins, with no effect on customer loyalty.

Revionics Price Optimization is part of its life cycle price optimization solution, which also includes Revionics Promotion Optimization and Revionics Markdown Optimization. The provider’s best-in-class lifecycle price optimization leverages advanced science that allows retailers to predict and influence consumer demand to achieve financial and price image goals.

“Retailers are facing some daunting challenges -- cost increases, increasing competition and a still-fragile economy -- and retail leaders that have implemented Revionics Price Optimization Software are seeing 1 percent to 3 percent sales growth and 2 percent to 4 percent gross margin improvements to their bottom line,” said Marc Hafner, president and CEO of Roseville, Calif.-based Revionics. “Rouses is a great example of a retailer that was an early adopter of pricing optimization to drive improved performance.”