Rexall Uses Geospatial Data Analytics to Align Offerings With Demand

The drugstore marketplace in Canada is highly competitive; it has grown in recent years to encompass more than 10,200 pharmacies. In this environment, some have tried to establish a competitive advantage by broadening their scope of care. Many consumers have reacted with expectations for additional products and services. Rexall has responded to this demand by expanding offerings for cosmetics, food and everyday living products.

For Rexall, site selection is business-critical. The lead time to open a new pharmacy is 18 to 24 months, so the company’s real estate strategy demands a long-term commitment to each project. Upwards of 20 Rexall staff work on an ongoing basis to execute the site-selection strategy, including assessing the current portfolio of stores and applying a predictive model to identify and evaluate new opportunities. “We require a focused, targeted approach to retail site selection,” says Dave Bolan, the company’s director of market development. “We have to optimize the deployment of our development capital and real estate resources. We need to continually evaluate our portfolio of stores, to identify underperforming and high-volume stores. We need to identify key marketing and merchandising opportunities, as well as accurately understand the growth potential market by market. And, of course, we have a commitment to our stakeholders to ensure the greatest possible ROI.”

Rexall turned to Precisely for help optimizing its real estate and capital investments. The pharmacy chain has been using Spectrum Spatial Insights for more than a decade to support site-selection decisions. “Spectrum Spatial Insights helps us be selective and targeted in our approach when entering new markets and optimizing existing ones,” Bolan says.

The Precisely solution incorporates Rexall pharmacy sales information and front-shop customer survey results with abundant demographic and geospatial data from Precisely. It then applies a finely tuned analytics engine deployed on the Precisely the Spectrum Spatial Insights mapping and analytics platform to run sales projections for both the pharmacy and the front-shop components of each prospective site location. The solution additionally determines the degree to which the new store would cannibalize existing Rexall units.

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