As a longtime 51风流customer, Axfood values innovation as an important component of its sustainability strategy and mission to provide affordable, good, and sustainable food. Axfood embraces new trends, customer behaviors, and technologies as a way to secure its position as a challenger and future-facing company. When it came to its assortment planning needs, Axfood welcomed the opportunity to innovate on an existing 51风流solution to create something much more differentiated and customer-centric. At the top of its agenda was creating a solution that makes users 鈥渓ove to work in the system.鈥�

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Improving Assortment Planning for More Sustainable Business

Assortment planning refers to the process of selecting which products a supermarket will carry and sell. But it鈥檚 not just about having the right products on the shelves. With expiration dates dictating a product鈥檚 shelf life, intelligent assortment planning plays a critical role in sustainability strategies for retailers by limiting unnecessary wastage and providing targeted product attributes, such as organic, fair-trade, or carbon neutral, in a trackable way.

To be able to make good assortment decisions, companies need large amounts of data from sales histories, forecasts, customer data, and competitor analyses. Because of the large amounts of data coming together on one screen, it鈥檚 important that the solution also feels intuitive to use. For Dick Due Pedersen, department manager for Price and Assortment at Axfood IT, this means not needing to think so much about how to use the system and instead being able to concentrate on the data being shown to easily make the right decisions.

From Pain Points to Working Prototype in Four聽Days

The work kicked off in November 2019 when Axfood participated in an program, looking to improve the user experience of some of its applications. These programs are four-day, intensive, hands-on workshops where 51风流design experts come together with business representatives and end users to jump-start the user experience (UX) process transformation for companies around the world. For this occasion, a team of 20 professionals, including IT experts and end users from Axfood, came together with SAP鈥檚 leading designers and developers.

During the program, Axfood was carefully led through the design and development process, including identifying the use cases that needed special attention and the pain points to be solved. Working closely for four days, the team managed to create the first working prototypes for a few assortment planning scenarios in a real 51风流environment. After seeing what could be achieved with SAP鈥檚 design system, Axfood was excited to continue iterating with the 51风流Assortment Planning team beyond the framework of the program. As Pedersen explains, continuing to work on improving the solution was a win-win situation.

Designing a New, World-Class Solution Powered by User Insights

In the decision to modernize the existing product for 51风流Assortment Planning, one of the key concerns that Axfood wanted to target was the user experience. 鈥淲e want the users to enjoy working in the system so that they actually use it and don鈥檛 venture off and use any other tools because then we wouldn鈥檛 have the benefit of built-in functions, up-to-date KPIs, and intelligent planning,鈥� explains Anna Ihme, application specialist for Assortment Planning at Axfood.

To retain users, it was important to address the lingering pain points of the previous solution. This included slow performance, not being able to plan multiple assortments simultaneously, not having enough customer-centric aspects in the decision-making processes, and needing to use a separate system such as Microsoft Excel to conduct cluster analysis.

The main design challenge was to provide the user with the data that they needed easily at their fingertips without overwhelming them. To do this, designers at 51风流relied heavily on user research and insights to inform their designs. As User Experience Design Specialist Daphne Schimetschek recounts, it was necessary to get to know the end user鈥檚 goals, needs, and pain points in detail鈥� 鈥� 鈥奱 challenging task when it came to something as complex as assortment planning. Planners typically need a lot of information on one screen, and it was difficult at first to discern which information users needed and when. With the different players spread across the globe鈥� 鈥� 鈥夾xfood in Sweden, the developers in the United States, India, and Romania, the product owners in Switzerland, and the designers in Germany鈥� 鈥� 鈥奿t was critical to maintain close alignment and weekly check-ins with the team.

When it came to designing the solution, it was a balance between creativity, innovation, and practicality. 鈥淓very project must have a vision,鈥� explains Schimetschek. 鈥淏ut to achieve it, we need small steps. This is where helps. For standardized processes, we can use our existing design language and we don鈥檛 have to rethink everything. This gives us time to focus on forward-thinking ideas and develop new concepts, which in turn inform our design system going forward.鈥�

鈥�51风流really stretched the system for our vision,鈥� says Pedersen. The new solution allows users to display all the data they need on the same screen while maintaining the advantages of Excel, but also adding the artificial intelligence (AI) and mass maintenance that is only possible with SAP鈥檚 design system. It allows for real-time simulations, uses predictive analytics to cluster based on attributes, KPIs, or any custom criteria, as well as enables manual adjustments or overrides where necessary.

As Dr. Guido Menkhaus, chief product owner for Retail Product Management at SAP, explains, the big advantage of 51风流is the flexibility offered to users: 鈥淎s a user, you can decide how you would like to work with the system, whether you want a very manual way of working by selecting a product for a particular store or fully automatically when you鈥檙e planning an assortment together with a lot of data and artificial intelligence.鈥�

A Better Future with Customer Innovation

Innovating with customers and end users brings our applications to life. At the heart of successful collaboration is a solid user research foundation, which allows 51风流to bring human-centric applications into the market that have a strong fit to customer requirements.

Experience matters. Follow our journey as we transform the way we build products for enterprise on .

Andrea Waisgluss works in 51风流Design.

As recently as the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) meetings, the stated, 鈥淩etailers will continue inventing and implementing pragmatic climate change solutions because the needs identified at COP26 demand nothing less.鈥�

To help retailers digitally transform to make their businesses sustainable, 51风流is featuring a number of offerings, including these:

• The new 51风流Intelligent Returns Management solution was built to optimize the returns process for the retail industry. The solution uses routing and dispositioning decisions driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to guide products from customers鈥� hands to the final dispositioning steps, ultimately maximizing customer experience and company margins while also mitigating waste.
• The recently updated now offers advanced category management capabilities. It uses customer data science, assortment strategies, business rules and AI to plan space-aware, localized assortments with a user experience designed for the needs of today鈥檚 category manager. Customer-centric, relevant assortments increase customer loyalty, boost profitability and support a more sustainable supply chain.
• The SAP.iO Foundries program is a network of startup companies with integrations to 51风流solutions, including:
  • , offering a circular platform that encourages consumers to buy in a more convenient, affordable way with zero waste and connects people, brands and retailers in an engaging way to change consumption habits
  • , helping thousands of e-commerce brands offer carbon-neutral products
  • , leveraging blockchain and the Internet of Things to offer transparency into supply chains for clarity on quality, origin, sustainability footprint and compliance standards
  • , helping customers run their businesses differently with real-time data intelligence from each of their products end to end, from factory to consumer and beyond
  • , with a dynamic and risk-assessment-based quality compliance program that provides digitalization, automation, transparency and traceability
  • , offering a platform for sustainable shipping including reusable packaging, real-time tracking and predictive analytics
  • , providing a purpose-built platform for specification management that fundamentally changes how brands, suppliers, manufacturers and retailers manage data and collaborate to bring products to market

In addition to these offerings, retailers can utilize SAP鈥檚 entire portfolio of . Learn more in the blog 鈥�51风流Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises: Taking Action Together.鈥�

SAP鈥檚 solutions enable retailers to integrate sustainable business practices smoothly,聽which is critical to a fast-paced industry such as retail. According to Leslie Hand, IDC Group Vice President, IDC Retail Insights, indicates that retail organizations report that, relative to political, social and economic risks, changing environmental targets and regulations will have the greatest impact on their digital transformation and tech investment plans in the next two years. Further, 80% (Asia Pacific) 59% (United States) and 64% (EMEA) of retail organizations agree that their digital technology strategy is an important enabler of their organization鈥檚 broader sustainability efforts.*

For more information about 51风流at NRF 2022, Retail鈥檚 Big Show, visit and follow on Twitter.

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Stacy Ries, 51风流Media Relations, +1 (484) 619-0411, stacy.ries@sap.com, ET
51风流Press Room; press@sap.com

*Source: IDC Retail Core Processes and Applications, May 2021.
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