Helping Valora Food Service come back stronger after the pandemic

Valora Food Service Switzerland

Every day, around 15,000 employees in the Valora network work to brighten up their customers’ journey with a comprehensive foodvenience offering – nearby, quick, convenient and fresh. Valora applies a multiformat strategy with twelve sales formats and about 2,700 sales outlets at highly frequented locations in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Valora Food Service Switzerland includes, among others, Brezelkönig, BackWerk, Caffè Spettacolo and SuperGuud.

Situation

Traditional Business Intelligence solutions with their focus on standard dashboards and reports can fulfill the basic analytics needs of a company. But what happens when an unexpected event, like a pandemic, hits the business? How do you navigate through such a crisis, understand its consequences and find the way to a speedy recovery with the use of data?

Like many retail businesses, the pandemic had a big impact on the business of Valora Food Service. When the pandemic measures were relaxed, it was vital to understand how business was getting back on track compared to pre-pandemic times. At the same time, new products were being launched to adapt to the changing consumer tastes and values. If that was already not ambitious enough, Valora Food Service also rolled-out a brand new loyalty program to serve their customers better. Static dashboards were simply not enough to cover the kinds of analyses that the business needed. Sales & Management at Brezelkönig had no easy, quick and intuitive way to get answers to the questions they needed by themselves. When looking for a solution to enable frictionless self-service analytics for all business users, Veezoo’s solution appeared on their radar.

When you want to capture the last percentage of revenue potential of a sales outlet, a standard dashboard is just not enough. We need the flexibility to look at the data and ask questions never asked before. Now I don’t need to think if a question is worth asking to the controlling team. I just ask Veezoo. I use Veezoo on a daily basis and do not want to miss it anymore!

Monika Zander

Valora Group, Managing Director Food Service Switzerland

Empowering Business Users with Veezoo

With billions of transactions and the motivation to empower business users to answer any ad-hoc question down to the transactional level, Veezoo was introduced. A diverse set of users were on-boarded ranging from sales managers, to marketing, to finance and management. With such a diverse set of users came a just as diverse set of questions, which could all be answered through Veezoo with no additional configuration required.

Valora uses Veezoo to quickly and flexibly analyze the performance of their sales outlets compared to pre-pandemic times, even during meetings. Marketing users were interested in understanding how the recently launched Loyalty program was working and how the buying pattern from loyalty customers differed compared to traditional buyers. Instead of compiling a list of questions to be analyzed by data specialists, get the answers and then ask another set of questions, business users could get answers by themselves directly in the moment they needed it, based on trusted definitions and reliable data.

Thanks to Veezoo we can use live analytics directly in update meetings with our sales partners. We use it to analyse the development of a sales outlet from all angles, even to predict how much inventory is needed on and across specific days. A question pops up in a meeting, I just ask it directly to Veezoo.

Martin Ramhapp

Valora Group, Head of Sales Food Service Switzerland

Example Questions

Valora uses Veezoo in German to answer questions such as:

• How many purchases were there last month with a cold drink in combination with hot dogs compared to 2019?
• What are the top 10 products of our gold-level loyalty customers? Compare it to bronze-level.
• How do our sales of Baguette Sandwich develop over the day at our train station sales outlets?
• Show me all Pretzel purchases that were made between 07:00 and 09:00 in Zurich on the last public holiday

Business Impact

With the help of Veezoo, Valora Food Service is changing their decision making process to be more data-driven and less gut-driven. The results speak for themselves. Business users are asking more questions from their data with an average of around 100 questions per month each! Yet, ad-hoc requests to the controlling team have decreased by a whopping 87%. This change in the way of managing the business and making decisions has enabled Valora Food Service to capture the remaining potential of sales outlets, improving their operational efficiency, while increasing revenue at individual locations by up to 5%.

We at Veezoo are happy to be part of this success story after the pandemic by helping Valora Food Service serve their clients better and brighten their journey again every day.