Yet, winners and losers in the escalating innovation crunch are determined by the answer to one simple question....“Which cures should be tackled first — and how fast can you find out if they help or hurt your business?”

Most supermarket reporting and control systems flunk this key question — which blindfolds executives charged with “getting it done.

”Lacking Wal*Mart-like enterprise systems, supermarkets largely operate on guesstimates of the single line-item making-up 75% of their total cost — cost of goods.

Why? Rigorous supermarket P&L’s are tough to do without in-store perpetual inventory. Warehouse cost of goods expense doesn’t correspond to matching promotion week register revenue — emasculating crucial numbers used to make decisions.

Running a supermarket chain without weekly store and departmental P&L’s — without matching sales to associated cost of goods — is like shooting in the dark. It’s a rare business, other than supermarket, that tries. Realtime cost controls and timely P&L’s are fetishes in most industries. Few grocery operators, other than Wal-Mart, even pay lip service to the subject.

“Taking the cure” — any cure — is energy frittered away, unless sound management reporting and control is in place. Witness the $38 billion recently squandered on supermarket bricks and mortar. Perfunctory use of even mediocre controls could have averted the blunder. Acquisitions and consolidations perpetuate the same old mistakes on a larger scale.

MicroNEX helps supermarkets usher-in the precursor needed to evaluate and direct operating innovations — realtime management reporting and control. It can usually do this with little impact on legacy General Ledger systems. In-store, CRISPtm enterprise software produces weekly store and department P&L’s, maintains demand data, and “feeds the numbers” to existing headquarter systems.

In-store, CRISP drives front-end hardware for improved checkout performance, maintains realtime perpetual inventory, executes vendor replenishment orders on demand, tracks deals, and rides herd on differentiated shopper programs to quickly recapture its cost with rock solid operational savings. More importantly, CRISP seizes strategic high ground. It unleashes three weapons:

1. consistent enterprise-wide “numbers” the troops understand, trust and use
   
   
2. delegated P&L responsibility to empower managers and evaluate them with the same yardstick used to measure CEO’s
   
   
3. realtime promotion and process evaluation institutionalizing continual change as the norm.

Supermarkets face an uphill battle. Wal*Mart’s enterprise system helped it snatch $65 billion of grocery business from supermarkets — and close-in on its $130 billion grocery sales goal for 2005.

MicroNEX is dedicated to helping our clients flourish in this increasingly hostile climate. We invite you to let realtime CRISP be your “unfair advantage.”