UK home improvement retailer Travis Perkins has improved its relationship with its customers following the implementation of an analytics platform from SAS.

The retailer is now able to manage its extensive product range, through identifying and stocking those products most important to customers across its 2,000 branches in the UK.

Travis Perkins sells over 200,000 unique stock-keeping units (SKUs), which present a challenge as many goods are bulky in an environment where physical store space is limited. There is an extensive product range available on short lead times, yet the group needs to identify and stock in branch the products most important to customers for immediate supply.

With the data now in a single repository, category managers can make better and quicker decisions about which products to stock in each branch using SAS Visual Analytics. Previously, inventory was managed using spreadsheets. To decide which products to stock at each branch, managers had to sift through thousands of rows of data, which was time-consuming and gaining insight was “arduous”.

Peter Brewer, supply chain development manager at Travis Perkins, commented: “Most range management solutions available on the market would not have been able to deal with the volume of products we stock or the complexity of our organisation.

“SAS and CoreCompete proposed a robust solution that could cope with the size and diversity of our business, and allowed us to layer sophisticated analytics over traditional range-management capabilities. We were particularly impressed with the purpose-built dashboards and user interface of the SAS offering.”

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