Focus on Virtual Reality and Last Mile Solutions
CHEP, the supply chain solutions company for many of the world’s largest supply chains, was among the winners in the prestigious IGD Awards 2017 programme. The winners were announced at the annual awards ceremony and gala in London on Tuesday, 3rd October.
CHEP won the IGD John Sainsbury Learning and Development award for combining category management and Virtual Reality (VR) to teach the value and benefits of using its platforms, such as quarter pallets, as reusable merchandising solutions in stores. The VR tool uses category management principles to develop employees’ and customers’ understanding, in an engaging VR store environment.
Stuart Comer, Head of Learning and Development at Sainsbury’s, said: “CHEP has clearly demonstrated how an innovative and engaging approach to learning and development can not only transform employee engagement and capability, but also how it can become a game changer in shaping business strategy and direction”.
“A truly global initiative, its Virtual Reality approach to enhancing ‘the last mile’ [1] has created added value well beyond its traditional business boundaries, and enabled CHEP to understand its customers and therefore build credible solutions in partnership.”
The majority of IGD Award winners were selected by judges from across the food and grocery supply chain. IGD is an education and training charity, channeling expertise into initiatives designed to help the food and grocery industry deliver the needs of the public. Its reach is global, with experts based in the UK, Asia and North America.
Christophe Loiseau, CHEP’s Senior Vice President for Last Mile Solutions (LMS), said: “We developed a VR tool that allows our employees and customers to learn, through category management principles, the value, benefits, and usage of CHEP platforms as a reusable merchandising solution in stores compared to the alternative”.
“VR allows CHEP to support customers to sell more with less, reducing out-of-stocks and improving merchandising and replenishment. We have a great commitment to innovating and collaborating in order to help drive efficiency and sustainability across supply chains”.
CHEP is an expert in Shopper Marketing[2] and supports customers to achieve shopper needs. Innovation is one of the pillars of the CHEP Last Mile Solutions strategy and it is focused on Promo Tracking (Internet of Things), Shopper & Product Connectivity and Augmented Reality. [3]
CHEP began the VR journey in Spain. The team created a VR simulation with VR partner (New Horizons) for a major retail chain store. A virtual hypermarket was built to give category management recommendations about how to meet shoppers’ needs through a different perspective using the VR tool. This was deemed a success as the retailer decided to implement the changes.
Based upon this success, CHEP decided to roll out the VR approach across CHEP Europe in the UK, France, Portugal, Benelux, Germany, Poland and Italy, and across CHEP North America in the United States, and Canada.
About the IGD Awards
The winners of the IGD Awards were selected by a panel of industry experts, including representatives from IGD and companies from across the food and grocery supply chain. For the first time ever in 2017, three awards were voted for by shoppers – the IGD Food-to-Go Operator of the Year, the IGD Online Retailer of the Year and the IGD Retailer of the Year – through IGD’s ShopperVista service, the drumbeat of the British grocery shopper.
IGD is an education and training charity for the food and grocery industry that undertakes research for the benefit of the public.
About CHEP
CHEP is a global provider of supply chain solutions serving the consumer goods, fresh food, beverage, manufacturing and retail sectors in more than 60 countries. CHEP offers a wide range of logistics and operational platforms and support services that are designed to increase performance and lower risk while improving environmental sustainability. CHEP’s 11,500-plus employees and more than 275 million pallets and containers deliver comprehensive coverage and exceptional value, supporting more than 500,000 customer touch-points for global brands such as Procter & Gamble, Sysco, Kellogg’s and Nestlé. CHEP is part of the Brambles Group, the operator of a portfolio that includes IFCO, the leading provider of Reusable Plastic Containers (RPCs) to the fresh food supply chain globally, as well as specialist container solutions providers to the automotive, aerospace and oil and gas sectors. For more information, visit chep.com.
For further information:
Víctor Collado,
Director, Corporate Communications
Europe, Middle East & Africa
Brambles Limited
C/ Vía de los Poblados, 3. P.E. Cristalia, Edificio 2
28033 Madrid – Spain
Tel: +34 659 691 864
[1] Last mile is a term used in supply chain management and transportation planning to describe the movement of people and goods from a transportation hub to a final destination in the home.
[2] Shopper marketing is “understanding how one’s target consumers behave as shoppers, in different channels and formats, and leveraging this intelligence to the benefit of all stakeholders, defined as brands, consumers, retailers and shoppers
[3] Augmented reality (AR) is a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are “augmented” by computer-generated or extracted real-world sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called computer-mediated reality, in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer.
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