Last Yard have been an absolute pleasure to deal with and have helped take our retail store to the next level which has allowed our business to return to its core role of providing great customer service.
Stephen Browning
Head of IT
About Autobarn
Autobarn is Australia’s leading automotive parts retailer, with more than 135 stores nationally. Autobarn prides itself on providing exceptional service and advice, paired with quality products, at low prices. Last Yard, along with Future Shelf, has worked with Autobarn’s largest franchise in Bundaberg to implement the first Electronic Shelf Label (ESL) solution in their network.
Retail Segment: Specialty
Location: Bundaberg, Australia
Company size: Mid market
Autobarn Bundaberg has always placed a strong emphasis on excellent customer service, but the burden of in-store logistics made it increasingly difficult to provide. Implementing price changes and offers was not only consuming valuable staffing resources, but also placing price accuracy and compliance at risk.
The manual-labour-intensive process of locating products on the shelves and managing stock had become inefficient. Staff changes and other external factors beyond their control made the problem even worse. Autobarn Bundaberg realised what was once a potential future option had become an urgent mandate: leverage technology to make their in-store operations more efficient before their core value of superior customer service was further compromised.
Automating in-store price changes and promotions allows the Autobarn Bundaberg store team to focus on what matters most: the customer, not the inventory.
Last Yard’s marketing execution platform uses Autobarn Bundaberg’s existing pricing, product and inventory data to generate presentation-ready marketing content for the shelf edge. Future Shelf’s electronic shelf labels (ESLs) display automatically updated information – including price changes and promotions – freeing up the store team’s time for customer service. All while saving $27,000 annually in labour costs.
A new catalogue event used to consume 3 to 4 days of store-team time. With Last Yard and Future Shelf ESLs, it takes just 6 hours.
Autobarn Bundaberg have peace of mind knowing their prices are correct.
With thousands of in-store products and multiple overlapping promotions that frequently changed, ensuring consistent price accuracy was a major challenge. The Last Yard platform integrates with Autobarn Bundaberg’s POS system to automate the pricing changes, instantly updating each individual product’s ESL with the POS system’s data.
Autobarn Bundaberg knows each price on their shelf is accurate – and with dynamically updated sales and promotions clearly displayed, their customers know they are getting the best price at a glance.
The Autobarn Bundaberg team now designs their own electronic labels with drag-and-drop ease.
Last Yard Studio, part of the Last Yard platform, empowers customers to design their own marketing materials for the shelf edge in both digital and paper formats. Its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface provides Autobarn Bundaberg complete control over their brand via easy-to-customise ESL templates.
Last Yard Studio incorporates product, price and promotional data into their templates, while giving retailers a wide array of aesthetic options including layouts, fonts, colours, images and sizes. Creating a special design for specific events is quick and easy; Autobarn Bundaberg’s head of IT created custom Mother’s Day ESL template designs in minutes!
The whole system was set up and fully running in 2 days, which is especially impressive, given that it was done the week before Christmas! We received great responsiveness and support in setup, from both the FutureShelf and Last Yard teams.
Stephen Browning
Head of IT