According to Supply and Demand Chain Executive, New England retailer Stop and Shop Supermarkets has tapped Blue Sky Logistics to provide supply chain visibility tools to help them better manage their supply chain processes and activities.

Immortalized in the classic song "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Quincy, Mass.-based Stop and Shop is a grocery retailer with more than 370 stores. Because of its growth and need to have better controls over its supply chain, Stop and Shop began looking for a visibility management tool several years ago.

The retailer wanted to become more proactive in managing the events that occur when supplying products to its end consumers, the retail stores. They saw a substantial financial savings to be gained by managing their supply chain on a proactive, exception basis, but they were having trouble sorting through the overflow of data to get to the information that mattered right then. In some cases, it was taking days to create reports that were obsolete as soon as they were available.

To address these challenges, the company recently implemented Blue Sky's Insight, a Web-based supply chain dashboard application that helps the end user to reduce unnecessary delays and inefficient use of resources by configuring a set of gauges and alerts that identify areas of the operation that require attention. Stop and Shop selected Blue Sky in part because of the solution provider's expertise in food and grocery supply chains.