Southern Glazier’s Wine & Spirits Saves Time & Money Automating Print Process

National beverage distributor, Southern Glazier’s Wine and Spirits, needed a solution for creating pricers (shelf sales tags) for use in New Hampshire Liquor and Wine Outlet stores. Producing, distributing, and merchandising these tags for monthly sales was becoming an inordinate and expensive task that oftentimes had errors. The challenge was obvious. There were 80 retail locations, approximately 15 sales representatives, hundreds of products on sale, and each store had a different number of product facings requiring a different number of sales tags. SGWS used to have a full-time staffer spend 1 whole week to simply print, cut, sort, and package these pricers for the sales merchandising team. They turned to Talient Action Group, and we automated this task from one file. Here’s how it works. SGWS creates an excel spreadsheet including the sales representative, their assigned stores, the products, and the number of facings per product (Figure 1). Once the spreadsheet is populated Talient Action’s system takes the excel document and uses variable data printing (along with quite a bit of system logic) to process the final print materials. The system knows the rules – for example, for every 4 facings a product has on the shelf, the retail location requires 1 pricer. Thus, a product with 12 facings would require 3 tags. The system was also programmed to understand which representatives cover which stores. Thus, each representative would get one package per store they must visit and merchandise. The result is that each representative receives the correct number of pricers per product. The system even knows that products in the store are displayed on shelves by category and then price range. The merchandiser can then quickly take the sales tags which are printed in order, and get their job done. See Figure 2. For pricer/sales tag reference. Figure 1. Pricers Spreadsheet

Figure 2. Pricer Example

TAG can turn this job around in 2-3 days, packaged and labeled by representative. They were thrilled to have that burden off their shoulders and gain back an entire week of a staff member. The best part…. The fees are simply printing. Once the programming is done, there’s no other cost than raw print. And, with so much of the automation being carried from preparation to press and to finishing/shipping, the savings are phenomenal. It’s practically the same cost as the client had in-house for the paper and desktop printers – not including labor.