Spar

Spar is the largest international food retail chain in the world with nearly 16,000 stores in 34 countries across the globe.

They are the UK’s leading convenience store group with over 2,700 stores throughout the UK. These stores are a combination of company owned and franchised, operated through 6 wholesaler groups trading under the Spar brand.

The challenge

To maximise sales in the face of increasing competition and higher expectations from customers, Spar needs to ensure that each of their stores meets the requirements of local customers.

This requirement must be balanced against ensuring that local tailoring does not impact upon profit margins by increasing complexity.

Spar has identified a number of formats tailored to the needs of their local customers. In order to implement these formats Spar require:

	To know the best format for each existing Spar store
	To know the best format for any new stores acquired by Spar
	Transparent rules to assign stores to formats
	Easily understood reports to communicate format decisions to a wide range of audiences in Central Office, wholesaler management and franchisee
	‘Press-button’ solution to meet all of the above

The solution

Working closely with Spar, CACI identified rules to assign any location in the country to one of the agreed formats. These rules were driven by a wide range of demographic data variables for the catchments around existing or potential store locations.

The solution built upon CACI’s experience of supporting store location planning for Spar over many years. With Spar already licensing much data, the Convenience Catchment Model (CCM), InSite GIS and SpatialModeller scenario management software from CACI, the solution was easily integrated into current systems held at Central Office.

Newly designed bespoke reports, output from SpatialModeller, automatically assign any store to a format through a few simple, wizard-driven, steps. These reports give simple, graphical, explanations of why the underlying data about a catchment assigns a store to a particular format, for dissemination throughout the business.
The results and benefits
The outputs have already been successfully applied to a number of stores for trialling the roll-out of the new store formats.

The outputs have been warmly received by the Spar UK Board and all of the Sales Directors across the UK wholesalers. The project is now set to be rolled-out across the UK estate and is key to Spar’s strategy in the coming year.

“The CACI reports have already proved invaluable in helping us to make the correct formatting decisions for our stores,” says John Murray Store Development Controller of Spar UK. “The clear outputs make it easy for all audiences to understand a store’s potential to maximise its sales given the local customer profile, and of course to agree on the actions needed to make it more effective at serving its local community”.

Outlet Segmentation and Ranging