Asda serves up customer value through integrated planning

Asda has provided affordable everyday groceries and essentials since the 1960s, and now serves more than 16 million customers in the UK every week. “Asda is one of the big four UK supermarkets,” says Tracey Wells, Anaplan Product Manager at Asda. “We’re currently on a mission to become the number-one choice for value-conscious families in the UK.”

Visionary thinking and precise planning have guided Asda’s remarkable growth. Teams at Asda devise promotions to bring customers in, forecast how many people will visit a store (and when), and ensure that products are in stock and easy to find when customers arrive. Asda also needs to manage its finances in a way that makes it all profitable.

Connecting plans for additional value

Asda first became an Anaplan customer in 2015. Then as now, decision-makers chose the Anaplan platform because it enabled them to build applications tailored to its business requirements. On a financial planning foundation, the company built SKU routing (what products should go where, at Stock Keeping Unit granularity), promotional planning (ways to attract customers), retail pricing (calculating Asda’s prices, including the popular “Roll Back” reductions, and communicating them to 1,100+ stores), all in Anaplan. The company also created and used a space optimization application in Anaplan to create floorplans in stores that are being refurbished.

In this multidimensional planning environment, Wells and her team have created synergies. For example, promotional planning and retail pricing are connected.  “We can create our promotions at the same time [as the prices],” Wells explains. “So as soon as they update their price, it will update the promotion planner. And it just means that everybody has got the most up-to-date information that they could possibly have.”

Similarly, financial planning is tightly tied to SKU routing. “A plan is only a plan until it hits the stores,” Wells explains. “We’ve built finance processes in Anaplan so if a store closes or something else changes, we can take care of that store and its customers.”

Unlocking agility and efficiency

Doing these complex tasks with Anaplan has automated manual processes and enabled people at Asda to apply their time to higher-value work. For example, SKU routing in Anaplan helps the logistics team see and manage the merchandise in Asda’s 42 distribution centers to boost product availability. If a store under- or over-performs, products can be quickly diverted to where they’re needed. Further, these situations can be planned for in advance.

“We can just push [products] around the country as we need to do,” Wells explains. “Logistics is not an easy job to do. But when you have all of that planning in place, it does make life a lot easier.” And by integrating business-rule checks into promotions plans and retail pricing, Asda has enabled teams to create competitive prices that align with strategy and market changes while meeting legal requirements (such as those that govern the positioning and promotion of high-fat, -sugar, or -salt foods, known as HFSS) and Asda’s agreements with its suppliers.

The space optimization application uses Anaplan Optimizer to refine store layouts and create “what-if” floor plan options based on store size, demographics, sales history, and other factors. Space optimization in Anaplan, which is done in collaboration with Asda’s data science team, has been used about 170 times over several years. “It’s been a real eye-opener in terms of how we can plan out our stores much more carefully and intelligently,” Wells says. It also delivers great value: Space optimization has been shown to increase revenue by 1% annually, or about £26 million for each optimized store layout.  

All of Asda’s work with Anaplan helps make the shopping experience better for millions of customers. But for Wells, the greatest satisfaction comes when she shops for her own groceries. “You only have to walk into a store and look at a price and know that you’ve helped to put that there,” she concludes. “As a product manager, you can only dream of having something that is so obvious, and so tangible, and so business critical.”