Food Lion to share demand data with suppliers

Food Lion LLC, a subsidiary of Delhaize America operating more than 1,300 stores in the US, will start sharing point-of-sale (POS) by store, by day and by SKU with its suppliers using Retail Solutions Demand Signal Management (DSM). Suppliers get access to near real-time data that is automatically converted to their own format, item master and hierarchies.

"Suppliers have a pivotal role in supporting Food Lion," said Troy Prothero, Supply Chain Manager, Food Lion. "Sharing data is a critical component of our strategy - it is the means by which both Food Lion and its supplier community create a single version of the truth to build a more efficient and effective supply chain. Retail Solutions provides our suppliers and us the right set of tools to proactively work together improving our joint operations."

Food Lion has already started sharing data sets with its suppliers, including not only POS and inventory data daily, by store and by item, but also many data points at the warehouse level, including shipment, ordering and receipt data.

"We chose Retail Solutions because their offering enables our suppliers to immediately and effectively leverage our data to drive improvements in our joint supply chain," said Pete Bonneau, Vice President of Efficiency and Productivity, Food Lion.

Retail Solutions Demand Signal Management is the most widely used retail platform for near real-time POS data sharing and analytics. More than 110 consumer goods companies trust Retail Solutions to analyze data from more than 20 different retailers, including seven of the top ten US retailers - on a single web-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS), user-friendly tool, without any upfront investment.