AutoZone Shifts into High Gear with ibi^™

Market-leading companies, such as AutoZone, depend on analytics to tighten their supply chains, automate in-store operations, improve merchandising activities, and predict market trends. AutoZone has a long tradition of technical leadership, and analytics guides the firm as it uses ibi™’s analytics platform.

Outcomes

AutoZone developed a self-service merchandising portal that enables 1,500 vendors to manage their inventory, see which products are selling, and optimize the merchandise mix. Vendors also use this portal to extract their supplier data and load it into their own information systems for processing.

AutoZone plans to use ibi RStat to apply predictive analytics to perennial retail problems. Eventually, the company will also leverage the tight integration between ibi’s analytics platform and the Esri geographic information system to allow closer monitoring of regional stores from headquarters.

Challenge

AutoZone, depends on analytics to tighten their supply chains, automate in-store operations, improve merchandising activities, and predict market trends.

Solution

Each AutoZone store uses ibi dashboards to access and drill into operational data. The IT department can control the data on the ibi analytics platform servers, while AutoZoners throughout the organization can help themselves to the information they need.

AutoZone, depends on analytics to tighten their supply chains, automate in-store operations, improve merchandising activities, and predict market trends.

Benefits

Analyzing Internet of Things (IoT) data is just one of many examples that reveal how AutoZone is data-driven. Other important analytics applications include:

• Sales Performance – Point-of-sale data from the entire store network is loaded into a repository at headquarters. Authorized users can query that repository to look at sales information and make daily, weekly, and monthly comparisons
• Inventory Tracking – Store managers, operations personnel, and senior staff in the store support center receive information from ibi ReportCaster by email each morning “On an average Monday morning, ibi WebFOCUS^® typically handles more than one million requests for information, with sub-second response time to our entire user community,” says the IT manager at AutoZone.