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You're an in-store bakery director and your manager shoots an email requesting you to update your sales and gross margin forecasts for the next two reporting periods. And, your manager wants the figures for a senior management meeting in two hours. If you're like many of your counterparts in the industry, you will scramble, pulling your initial forecasts, applying guesstimates based on current sales trends, accounting for any changes in promotions and drawing on gut feelings for good measure. You then will hold your breath as you click “send” when forwarding your update.

But, relying on guesstimates and gut feelings ensures accuracy only slightly better than had you thrown a dart while blind-folded. In-store management at Brookshire Grocery Co., Tyler, Texas, believes dart-throwing belongs only in family rec rooms and taverns.

Since applying new management tools during the last 12 months, “We now make decisions based on facts and not on opinions based on personal preferences,” observes Linda Wiggins, vice president-bakery/deli operations. She and other company officials are developing a business strategy designed not only to track and forecast financials quickly and accurately but to enable each of the firm's 149 stores in five states to meet local customer needs. The strategy includes:

• introducing category management to optimize inventory control, to identify top sales potential by product and to build sales and profits;

• tapping the company's newly installed state-of-the-art software network to retrieve and analyze bakery sales performance data precisely and at nearly real time;

• organizing stores into market clusters based on local demographics, not geographical location; and

• developing a product knowledge-based training program that will help turn all store employees into sales “ambassadors.”

Brookshire applied category management to bakery operations about 18 months ago and implemented the software to track sales performance only a few months ago. Yet, the changes already are yielding positive results, officials say.

They point to greater ability to identify products with strong sales potential, capacity to adjust product lines more quickly, consistency in store-to-store bakery offerings, greater control of costs, enhanced product quality and fewer stales without corresponding losses in sales.

Brookshire’s decorators are using more fresh fruit to garnish cakes.

“Before category management, we based decisions on movement through our warehouse and central bakery, sales through the cash registers and, too often, on gut feelings,” recalls John Rose, category manager — bakery. He is responsible for selecting and purchasing products from vendors and Brookshire's central bakery, setting retail prices, tracking sales by product category and meeting gross margin goals.

Rose collaborates with Wiggins, who within her management responsibilities, focuses on bakery sales, merchandising, training and labor costs. She is supported by six bakery/deli zone supervisors. A bakery manager's job includes, among other duties, displaying products correctly and in appropriate quantities, selling them and controlling stales to help support gross margins.

Each supervisor is responsible for 20 to 30 bakeries. Supervisors establish bakery labor hours in consultation with store directors. Though Rose is not responsible for labor costs, he considers labor when selecting products, ensuring that employee skill sets and equipment are in place and that labor costs can be justified.

“We can dig into a product category, break it apart and see unit and dollar movement, stales and returns, as well as margins. All of this is on an Excel spreadsheet,” Rose says. “This allows us to identify which products are selling in which stores. We can quickly see those products that need attention.”