The Dutch grocery retailer Spar decided to manage all its retail weighing scales centrally from the company’s headquarters using the METTLER TOLEDO RetailSuite software. This centralized approach has proven to reduce software costs, increase equipment uptime and overall visibility to the store level across the chain.
Spar runs around 320 small and medium-sized supermarkets in
the Netherlands. Recently, the grocery retailer decided to fully
centralize its price, item and data management and migrated into a
cloud-based solution. All local servers were removed and all existing
weighing scales were updated to METTLER TOLEDO UC Evo Line networked
scales. As part of this project, Spar also decided to reorganize its
scale management activities. METTLER TOLEDO, as a long-standing partner
of the grocery retailer, added a software solution to the project, the
METTLER TOLEDO RetailSuite (MTRS), which was perfectly aligned with
Spar’s new centralization process.
“The solution sounded
interesting to us right from the start,” recalls Paul Willems, Manager
Store Support at Spar Netherlands, “because the METTLER TOLEDO software
enables data from each scale to be exchanged immediately via a single,
central server.”
With MTRS, data management for all scales now
takes place via the DistributionServer, which is located at Spar’s
headquarters and is the centralized server for pulling and pushing
information centrally for RetailSuite. Thanks to the intuitive portal of
the DistributionManager, Paul Willems and his support team are able to
see all the scales at a glance, grouped according to country, region and
sales division. In just a few clicks, single scales can be updated, or
all scales in the store network can be reconfigured.
Shortly
after the installation of the new system, Spar was able to use MTRS to
establish the parameters for their new label layout in accordance with
the new labelling regulations. Furthermore, the scales are loaded with
price and item information by the DistributionServer, which ensures that
every scale is always up to date.
To download the full case study, visit www.mt.com/retail-spar.