Nearly all retailers operate with compressing margin pressures and a customer base who is less loyal to brands than ever before. AArete’s expertise in sourcing and data analytics in addition to market intelligence and comprehensive retail and consumer strategies aids retailers in significantly reducing their costs across store operations, transportation/logistics, IT, HR and general administrative functions. 

Using our proven data-driven methodology and cross-industry best practices, AArete helps mitigate the continually rising operational expenses by implementing strategic profitability improvement initiatives. We accelerate cost savings to ensure spend reductions are impacting your bottom line. Despite constant change and market pressure, our strategic profitability improvement solutions position our clients to feel confident in their financial position.

The most successful procurement function drives maximum value. But for many retailers, procurement has evolved into a low-value, high fixed-cost department. For some stakeholders, procurement is nearly non-existent. Yet, transforming the procurement function may not always be the right answer. AArete’s Procurement as a Service (PaaS) solution takes the guesswork out of procurement, allowing retailers to step back from managing these non-core functions and focus on their core market differentiators, such as growing their revenues. 

Our PaaS offering is an independent, managed service that accelerates the realised savings and improves the ROI of your procurement function while optimising your operations through automation and digital transformation. We focus on rate renegotiation, demand management strategies, process improvements and technological best practices to help you realise a significantly greater ROI from your procurement function. Rather than insourcing, we take on all procurement responsibilities from tactical buying to strategic sourcing initiatives to contracting, giving you confidence in your procurement function, while keeping you focused on strategic initiatives.

The strength of any retailer is knowing its consumers. When consumers visit online or in store, they create critical data points that can be interpreted to understand who they are and what they want. Retailers must harness this data effectively to gain insights into customer behaviours, drive more frequent transactions and greater revenues, and increase new customer acquisition. 

AArete employs powerful data analytics to help empower sales associates with upsell opportunities and sharpen their marketing strategies. Our advanced team of retail data scientists and industry experts extract critical insights by capturing the most pertinent customer data and interpreting it through our variety of powerful analytics engines in order to improve consumer reach and acquire new customers. Using rich purchasing, customer loyalty, merchandising and third-party data, AArete implements behavioural and contextual targeting to create a personalised and tailored approach for your customers. From there, we employ upsell opportunities, personalised marketing campaigns, loyalty programme analysis and foot traffic assessments to help drive growth, retain existing customers and win new ones.

The timely and accurate flow of goods is a significant challenge for most retailers. With an ever-changing merchandise mix and the constant pressure to incorporate omnichannel strategies, retailers must react quickly to continually optimise their supply chains. AArete looks at improving supply chain operations as an automation and innovation challenge rather than a run-of-the-mill process problem – with a particular emphasis on the power of data analytics.

We pull from our extensive transportation industry experience, supply chain expertise and our work with retail leaders to develop custom data-driven solutions for your supply chain needs. Using a hands-on approach, we assess the direct and indirect network of interlinked providers and entities connected by product, suppliers, information and systems to recommend more efficient supply chain management processes. By examining source vendors, distributors, transportation network, distribution centres and warehouse processes, we’re able to integrate operations, identify opportunities for bots and automation, improve handoffs, transform silo management to cross-functional processes and enhance visibility to product flow.

The lines between brick-and-mortar and online experiences are blurring more every day. Charged with balancing stock and assortment with omnichannel delivery, you must find ways to integrate these two environments, while still meeting consumers’ ever-increasing shopping preferences and delivery demands.

AArete’s data-minded approach assesses and works to improve your inventory management capabilities, while creating a more responsive and efficient supply chain that supports all channels and product requirements. Whether responding to new buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) strategies and changing product assortments, retailers like you rely on AArete’s data-centred approach to ensure service levels and product availability match, while reducing investments in working capital. Using data, we create customised algorithms that manage demand and supply uncertainties across your entire network. This helps determine optimal inventory levels at stores and distribution centres and how best to deploy inventories between brick-and-mortar locations and e-commerce platforms. By decreasing inventory costs, reducing stale inventory and increasing fill rate, AArete’s online retail consulting methods help increase profitability while staying relevant across each and every channel.

While foot traffic in stores has declined, store customer expectations continue to rise. Meanwhile, a world of options and choices have resulted in volatile customer loyalty. In response, retailers are forced to respond by balancing the cost of store labour with the need to meet customer expectations. While most retailers have invested in human capital applications, AArete adds accretive value to those programmes with a fact-driven approach rooted in process improvement, automation and innovation.

We combine time studies, transactional data, employee interviews, foot traffic data, delivery scheduling, assortment information and traditional industrial engineering standards with our own internal dataset to develop a custom labour model for each physical store. And because every store is different, our approach helps streamline each location’s roles, responsibilities and operations to ensure its store workforce meets demand. Armed with a clear profile of each store’s unique foot traffic pattern and customer data, AArete can also help you predict future labour needs, while maximising your workforce’s efficiency and output.