Berezka

Berezka is a grocery retail company with operations in Bulgaria (62 stores) and Romania (13 stores) that carries 1200 SKUs on average. The company also has three distribution centers and three manufacturing sites.

The project objective for Berezka was to automate order generation, reduce overstocks and increase sales by eliminating lost sales and improving turnover. 

Challenge

The first Berezka grocery store opened in 2009 in Varna, Bulgaria. Originally, the company was a family business, and the founders could not have foreseen it would soon be present in all major cities in Bulgaria and Romania.

Prior to the introduction of LEAFIO Inventory Management (Inventory Optimization), the company had no IT solutions for order management automation – all the processes were decentralized.

In all retail chain stores, stocks were administered by managers who worked as sellers as well. The orders were manually made in Excel, causing numerous errors: missed orders, reorders, under orders. Whenever managers generated orders, stores faced poor service quality.

Therefore, Berezka's management aimed to eliminate the human factor in the order generation process and focus on their sales, merchandising and mini-audits. The company initiated the automation of the order generation process as the business started scaling and expanding. The company set the following goals:

• redesign the inventory management system;
• automate the order generation process;
• reduce inventory and increase sales by eliminating lost sales;
• improve turnover.

Management was almost about to abandon their goals, as it was quite a challenge to introduce order automation into a decentralized system. Firstly, they considered developing an in-house IT solution, but it turned out to be quite expensive and time-consuming. Out of several companies on the market, they eventually chose the LEAFIO team for its professionalism, flexibility and product favorability. Let’s take a deeper dive.

Process

The LEAFIO team and the client team have launched the following processes:

• automation of all the main assortment orders;
• directors' working process with the inventory management was redesigned and concentrated on customers, merchandising and mini-audits;
• only 2 people were allocated to manage the entire inventory system in the central office rather than having at least one employee in each store.

Outcomes

The close cooperation between the client’s and LEAFIO’s team has resulted in:

• centralized inventory management system in all stores in Bulgaria;
• 25% inventory reduction along with increased sales;
• 13% turnover acceleration;
• access to a quick response to all the bottlenecks due to the system analytical reports;
• simplified scaling process;
• developed merchandising: retail shelves have become much more attractive to consumers;
• central warehouse receives orders from all stores until 10:00, while it used to be 13:00.