That’s the place where, stopwatch in hand, he and three other Bentley students — Chris Hayes ’11, Monika Aderbauer ’12 and Cody Normyle ’13 — spent hours collecting data for a competition sponsored by the grocery store chain. Price Chopper’s Ultimate Innovation Competition engages college students to contribute creative, actionable ideas to the company, which operates 128 stores in six northeastern states. Bentley’s team took home the $8,000 first prize.
The students got involved after Professor Mark Davis and Senior Lecturer James Salsbury – both of the Management Department – learned of the contest in late 2010. The pair emailed former and current students, and Gerrity, Hayes, Aderbauer and Normyle stepped up.
“Other schools offer course credit for participation in the contest,” says Davis, who joined Salsbury in advising the team. “But we wanted to have students who were really interested, rather than just doing it for credit. We felt that was a big advantage for us.”
Making the Cut
The contest involved several rounds: a one-page proposal of an innovative idea, a detailed 15-page report fleshing out the idea and demonstrating its utility, and a formal presentation to Price Chopper senior executives in Schenectady, N.Y. A team was able to submit more than one proposal, but could be eliminated in any of the three rounds.
The initial challenge was hatching a creative idea that was also actionable. The company provided a list of potential areas to explore, such as product inventory and the checkout experience. After several brainstorming sessions and a conference call with Price Chopper managers, the Bentley team had its focus: strategies to speed up the checkout process in stores during peak times.
Building a Case
Anyone who has ever run out to the supermarket the day before a holiday has likely experienced the problem that the Bentley students were trying to solve. Peak times are the super-busy periods when checkout lines seem to extend all the way to the back of a store. The team needed not only to provide a remedy for long lines, but to prove the solution could actually work.
The team used two primary types of information from the Marlborough store: point-of-sale data that Price Chopper provided and on-site data they collected themselves, on site. The latter involved many hours standing behind registers (both cashier-operated and self-service) with stopwatches, recording the time that elapsed between scanning the customer’s first item and presenting the receipt.
With research gathered, team members fired up a simulation software program called ProcessModel. Step 1 was recreating the actual conditions they experienced at the Marlborough location, in other words, how long it took on an average day for a customer to go through the checkout process. Once that baseline was established, the students could accurately measure, through simulations, the impact of any changes they made to store operations to speed up checkout. The last step was confirming their initial baseline results mathematically, to prove the simulation model accurately reflected the actual store conditions.
The Bentley team’s final proposal had several recommendations. Some involved personnel solutions; others introduced new equipment that Price Chopper wasn’t using at the time.
“Once they had the simulation,” Davis explains, “they could show, for each incremental change, what the incremental benefit would be.”
Getting Results
Gerrity, Hayes, Aderbauer and Normyle advanced to the final round of competition, with a 45-minute presentation at Price Chopper headquarters in late April. Company executives were impressed.
“They didn’t just form an idea from a classroom,” says Heidi Realer, director of marketing and consumer insights for Price Chopper. “They went out and got their feet wet in our business. No team has taken it to that level before.”
Out of six final teams — and about 75 initial submissions — the Bentley group emerged the winner. Indeed, the Bentley project earned a unanimous first-place vote by the Price Chopper management team who evaluated the entries.
“It felt great,” says Normyle. “It’s one thing to put a lot of effort into a class and receive an A, but to see real-world results in a larger-scale competition like that was unreal.”
Gerrity calls the experience one of the most rewarding in his college career. “We put a lot of hard work into it, and we were able to present a solid result. That’s something you can carry out throughout your entire life.”
