New England Retailer Selects Software Developer for its Expertise in Food and Grocery Supply Chains

DALLAS -- Stop & Shop Supermarkets, a New England-based grocery retailer with more than 370 stores, has selected Blue Sky Technologies, Inc. to provide supply chain visibility tools to help them better manage their supply chain processes and activities.

Stop & Shop recently implemented Blue Sky's Insight™, a web-based supply chain dashboard application that allows 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.

Because of its growth and need to have better controls over its supply chain, Stop & 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 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.

"Insight will have an immediate and substantial impact on our operations," said Joe Francis, manager of process and systems improvement at Stop & Shop's Supply Chain Strategy and Execution Group. "Upon implementation of Insight, supervisors and managers of the operation will be able to spend more time actually managing the operation instead of mining for data or waiting until reports could be generated."

"We decided to come to market with a product that didn't merely mimic other ad hoc query tools," said Randy Marble, CEO and chairman of Blue Sky Technologies, Inc. "Nor did we feel comfortable in selling a product that needed a large amount of customization just to make it work. We can deploy Insight in a matter of days with a robust set of standard features that can be tuned to meet the individual needs of the customer. By using a dashboard to view the current operating conditions of their supply chain, upper management has more free time to devote to strategic decisions instead of waiting until the next day to see how well the operation is performing."

"We intend to utilize Insight well beyond our warehouse management systems," Stop & Shop's Francis added. "From a supply chain viewpoint, Insight helps us gain visibility across our corporate information systems. We envision that Blue Sky's Insight will play a mission-critical role in our business decision process."

For a complete case study of Stop & Shop's implementation of Insight™ and its impact on supply chain processes for the retailer, please contact Steve Hensley at Blue Sky Technologies.

About Stop & Shop

Based in Quincy, Mass., Stop & Shop operates 376 stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York and employs more than 58,000 associates. For more information, visit www.stopandshop.com.

About Blue Sky Technologies

Blue Sky Technologies, Inc. is a supply chain visibility software company that provides customers with targeted executive decision dashboards, such as its flagship product, Insight. The company's solutions are configurable to serve the needs of multiple individuals within a company's various levels of supply chain responsibilities. Blue Sky Technologies offers integrated, prepackaged supply-chain software and quality service offerings to clients to enhance their customers' competitive advantage in the marketplace. For more information, visit www.blueskytech.com.

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