From the Wolseley team:
‘Part of our process of opening new stores involves providing property with equipment requirements at an early stage so they can determine the right size store and calculate costs for the project. The only way we had to accurately complete this task was to complete a range review and then fully planogram the store. Without generic planograms and with elements of local ranging this meant it would take around ten days to complete. This also led to a high number of errors within the planograms as we were rushing to get these requirements back to property as fast as possible before we had to move onto the next branch.
This is where we engaged OSP: with their expertise we were able to create an automated solution that would take an inputted range, churn the numbers and produce accurate equipment requirements. Wolseley have now been working with the solution for two months and have completed the requirements for six whole branches. This saves us a total of 48 days’ worth of work already.
In creating this solution, Wolseley outlined our existing process to the OSP team who then suggested we could automate and streamline a lot of the work that went into it. The OSP Category Management Consultant then created a working prototype and we spent a day together adapting it for Wolseley.
The OSP teams help has unlocked some greater analysis that we simply didn’t have the time or resources to complete before. Wolseley and OSP have been able to identify which existing branches can adapt to additional contract ranges which was previously almost impossible due to the complexity of our existing storage mediums. We have also used the tool to identify and evaluate how many clusters each category should be split into, which in turn, allows us to make decisions before spending a great deal of time and labour on planogramming.
The unique thing about this solution is that it was built from the ground up to deal with the weird and wonderful nature of our business that we had previously thought there was no solution for. Being able to streamline such a crucial part of our project process has been truly ground breaking not only for our own space planning team, but for every other stakeholder in the business and has finally broken the never ending cycle of bespoke planogramming allowing me to focus on our next steps in our space planning journey.’