Price Chopper Speeds up Data Analysis With IBM Netezza

Regional independent Price Chopper, a Golub Corp. company and one of the largest supermarket and pharmacy chains in the northeast, is using a new tool from IBM to gain a better understanding of its customers' shopping trends and improve customer service.

Called IBM Netezza, the data warehouse appliance helps Price Chopper analyze large amounts of data from sales, merchandising and supply chain, and inventory systems at fast speeds.

“Helping our customers has always been a core focus of our business and a key reason for our success,” said Greg Zeh, CIO of Golub Corp. “We needed a high performance and easy-to-use business analytics technology to better understand our customers’ shopping trends and improve our bottom line. IBM Netezza offers the simplicity we were looking for and, now, we will be able to decrease out-of-stock items, reduce shrinkage, and analyze our retail promotions.”

As a result, Price Chopper expects to realize better profitability through more efficient, accurate, and insightful review of its daily business activity.

IBM Netezza is built specifically to analyze petabytes of detailed data significantly faster than existing data warehouse options, and at a much lower total cost of ownership. It stores, filters and processes petabytes of records within a single unit, analyzing only the relevant information for each query, according to IBM.

“Price Chopper is known for its innovative merchandising strategies—all focused on better serving their customers,” said Jim Kelly, IBM Netezza’s SVP and General Manager Distribution Sector. “IBM Netezza provides insight that goes hand-in-hand with Price Chopper programs to support customer loyalty and improve ROI behind specific promotions.”

Schenectady, N.Y.-based Golub owns and operates 128 Price Chopper supermarkets in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont. It’s more than 24,000 associates collectively own 52 percent of the company’s privately held stock.