Brico io, an Italian DIY retailer owned by Coop Lombardia group, has reached the final stage of implementing Retano Shelfplan, solution for the automated management of store space.
Agostino RUSSO,
Chief Information Officer
Brico Io
“The project with Retano comes from the evolution of our Space Management process with a dynamic and integrated model. In Retano Shelfplan we identified an individual solution capable of achieving advanced automation with the flexibility we needed to manage the specificity of our new assortment and our new sales network, offering us more concrete answers to all the operational complexity of the DIY sector.”
Managing over 120 stores and more than 30,000 products requires significant organizational effort every day. This complexity is typical of the DIY sector, where the assortment is extremely diverse, ranging from small accessories to heavier and bulkier materials. Added to this is the variety of shelves and aisles, each with different characteristics and often requiring specific equipment. In this context, proper space organization becomes a key factor in increasing sales, but at the same time, it represents a demanding and time-consuming task for the staff.
Brico Io is a rapidly expanding business, and to support this growth, it has chosen to focus on optimizing its operational processes. The goal is to reduce the most burdensome manual workload without sacrificing precise control over how products are presented and the actual shelf yield. Adopting a solution like Retano Shelfplan will allow Brico Io to more effectively manage store space, supporting the chain’s growth and improving existing stores.
Retano Shelfplan: End-to-End Retail Space Management
Retano Shelfplan is a tool that handles everything related to in-store space, from strategic planning to operational control. With minimal manual effort, the system achieves significant results: time is saved, waste is reduced, and sales are increased thanks to more curated displays. The system ensures that every product is placed in the correct place thanks to precise rules and intuitive visual guides. This helps maintain tidy and consistent stores.
Retano Shelfplan generates planograms completely automatically. Manual intervention is only necessary to manage specific cases or technical and unconventional tasks. This way, the software’s intelligence does all the heavy lifting, leaving people in control of decision-making in situations requiring special considerations.
This approach goes beyond the initial creation phase; it also ensures continuous planogram updates, a task that in practice requires many hours of manual labor. Every product change or structural modification to the shelves automatically triggers a layout recalculation. Thanks to scheduled updates or specific triggers, planograms always remain consistent and aligned with the store’s reality. Rather than having to manually adjust each change, the software recalculates the optimal position of each item, ensuring a constantly updated store with minimal operational effort.
Retano Shelfplan goes beyond simple product organization: it transforms every inch of display space into a measurable economic indicator. The platform evaluates profitability per linear meter with extreme granularity, from the entire store to individual areas, down to the specific shelf and individual SKU. This eliminates “blind spots” where value is lost: space is no longer assigned by custom, but strategically allocated where it generates the greatest economic return.
No data lost: 1,500 planograms imported from the previous system
One of Brico Io’s initial priorities was to preserve and enhance the significant work already accomplished with the previous system. The project began with data migration: over 1,500 planograms were imported, a valuable information asset that, without a structured approach, would have required extremely long manual verification times.
To ensure the absolute reliability of the information, the Retano team adopted advanced tools based on Artificial Intelligence. AI performed automatic verification, comparison, and validation of the entire data set, ensuring consistency and quality from the earliest operational stages. This approach enabled a seamless transition to the new platform, without impacting store operations and without the need to reconstruct previous work.
Retano Solutions doesn’t just solve retailers’ current challenges, it also aims to anticipate future market needs. Our development team continuously works to improve Retano Shelfplan, offering users innovative tools and solutions ready for tomorrow’s challenges, capable of transforming operational complexity into a competitive advantage.
The adoption of Retano Shelfplan will generate tangible benefits throughout the entire Brico Io network: the 120 stores will present a coordinated and consistent image, planogram design times will be significantly reduced and, above all, sales per square meter will increase thanks to data-driven display space management that focuses on the performance of each individual shelf.
