It starts with food
There’s a reason our customers refer to their H-E-B as “my H-E-B” – for many of them, their local store reflects what they love. Your H-E-B would be unrecognizable without the ingredients on the shelf for your mom’s famous lasagna or your grandma’s legendary banana pudding. You expect your favorites to be there, like they always are, and that’s why it’s your H-E-B.
This aspect of H-E-B culture is a big one, which is why we are constantly working to make sure each store tailors to the community it resides in, so that each customer has that same special relationship with their H-E-B. It’s our goal to create a fun and immersive shopping experience for all our shoppers, and it starts with the food on the shelves. We are a grocery store, after all.
Back in 2008, we created a model that presented a breakdown of product and customer data from each store to help us understand what our customers were buying, so we could meet that demand. As time passed, and we continued to grow, our current tools had a hard time keeping up and we noticed that our new Category Managers weren’t using them. This slower adoption rate increased the workload of our managers as they relied on spreadsheets to categorize the data efficiently — we needed a new tool.
A Hub that relies on immersive customer data and Partner instinct
While there were already many third-party tools we could have used, we decided to use our expertise to build something in-house that would adapt to the needs of our ever-growing business — enter, the Assortment Hub.
The Assortment Hub is basically a tool that centralizes data for our Partners (goodbye excel spreadsheets!) so they can decide more efficiently what products should go into stores based on the robust customer data we already have at our fingertips. It’s meant to help our Category Managers uncover new product opportunities, rationalize current assortment, and automate store specific merchandise. While this tool is informed in large part by the dataset we have on our stores and products, it also pulls in the unique insights of our tenured Partners who have watched what goes in and out of each store for many years.
While this is an ever-evolving tool, there are two features that can be used heavily now — the Decision Tree, which houses category data to help managers understand categories and products and how it’s evolving over periods of time, and the Product Portfolio, which helps evaluate current assortment and newly available products. Both features provide immediate feedback, whereas previously it took a more significant amount of time to collect that data and use it to inform what products were in stores.
The products the customers want, the tool that helps us deliver
Not only does the Assortment Hub immediately expose areas of opportunity, but it also powers all other assortment decisions, ensuring every store meets the needs of the customer. After introducing these new and improved features, our Category Managers can multitask more efficiently as they utilize the data available to them to better support the customer.
The Hub encourages our Category Managers to use their knowledge and insights of their regions, combined with historical customer data to make informed decisions that drive business. We’re excited to see the Assortment Hub continue to grow and adapt so we can continue supporting our culture of “my H-E-B.”
