TEMPLE, Texas -- Convenience-store distributor McLane Co. Inc. is continuing its investment in analytics and performance-tracking tools with the rollout of McLane Link.
McLane Link is an online portal solution that provides retailers access to performance and operational data, including the ability to see order and delivery data by store and by item. It also improves operational efficiencies by providing a simple web-based guide that gives retailers quick access to key metrics. Reports can be viewed online or exported to Excel or PDF files, and a scheduling feature allows each customized report to be emailed directly to the customer or other company employees.
“With McLane Link, our retailers can quickly locate the exact information they are looking for and customize a report specific to what is needed,” said Deon Johnson, vice president of customer technology for McLane.
McLane Link features include:
- Service-level reporting: A status report for all orders placed, received and en route, including the fill rate of each item and an overall service percentage.
- Delivery reporting: A performance view of current and past delivery arrival times. A calendar feature allows for the review of delivery detail on a weekly, monthly or several month basis.
- Delivery scheduling: A comprehensive directory of key account information for all retailer locations, including billing cycle and mailing address. Retailers can view reroutes, load days and other scheduling information pertinent to each store location.
- Credits: An account of all credits issued by delivery drivers searchable by date range. Filtering can be applied to review specific locations, amounts or geographic details.
- Plan-o-grams: Corporate and store-level access to the latest plan-o-grams created from McLane’s Center for Category Innovation. Retailers are able to include their own store-level plan-o-grams and upload them directly into the McLane Link portal.
- Slice and dice report with conditional alerts: Each field can be reordered, removed or have column-level filtering. Alerts can be added to notify retailers when specific conditions or thresholds have occurred.
Four retailers have rolled out the solution and another 10 are scheduled to be in production by the end of November. Additional features requested by customers will be rolled out over the coming months.
Temple, Texas-based McLane provides grocery and foodservice supply-chain solutions for convenience stores, mass merchants, drug stores and chain restaurants throughout the United States. It is a wholly owned unit of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Omaha, Neb.
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