Challenge: This independent grocer struggled with an inefficient reporting process, making it difficult to use data to make decisions about staffing and products.

Solution: Domo provides real-time insight into all the company’s data across sales, operations, and marketing.

Impact: Executives and store department managers use Domo to ensure adequate staffing during busy periods and keep fresh items on the shelves.

Harmons Grocery brings fresh insight to its shelves with Domo.

After starting as a single fruit stand in 1932, today Harmons Grocery has 20 locations across Utah that offer hundreds of thousands of products. In order to keep its shelves stocked with fresh, quality foods, Harmons relies on Domo to track sales, expenses, and staffing.

“We have over a million rows of data coming in every day. Having Domo helps us easily process that information and make it approachable for all our users. Our teams now have the tools they need to effectively manage their business instead of feeling like they have to guess all the time,” said Lexi Allsop, director of analytics at Harmons Grocery.

Simplified, centralized reporting

Before Domo, Harmons didn’t have a centralized reporting tool or vetted data warehouse. Capturing data and running reports was difficult and time-consuming, leaving store managers to make decisions based on last year’s numbers or instinct.

“Running reports could easily take an entire day, so we got used to having only essential reports available on a weekly or quarterly basis,” said Allsop. “Anything outside that scope was rarely delivered on because it was too time-consuming, or it would be delivered weeks or months later when it was no longer relevant.”

Thanks to Domo, more than 1,000 users across the company ranging from the CEO to frontline managers can now instantly access data for any item. Harmons uses Domo to collect data from across the organization, including sales, finance, HR, and marketing, to understand how its promotions and staffing impact sales.

“Currently, we have over 200 dashboards and over 3,000 cards. It’s entirely shifted our culture to be more data-driven,” Allsop said. “All our reports have been automated. Just last week I was talking to our warehouse manager. He said it used to take him five hours a day to build a report, and now it’s a two-minute process. You take that one instance and multiply it by thousands of employees over the years, and it really adds up.”

“We always say that you get what you measure. But what we want to measure changes frequently. We’re able to measure pretty much whatever we need to, so we know where to focus as our business changes from season to season,” said Todd Jensen, executive vice president of sales at Harmons Grocery. “It becomes addicting when you have that information at your fingertips, and once you have it you can never imagine going back.”

Improving staffing while reducing waste

Harmons uses Domo to understand when customers like to shop throughout the day, the week, and year so it can ensure the right departments are adequately staffed.

“We combine our sales data with our HR data to forecast labor needs hour by hour. We have different needs throughout the day for different locations, so this helps ensure we have people when it will be busiest instead of during our slower hours,” Allsop said.

“One of the things we found is that many stores have equal or greater sales on Sunday, but we were actually staffing Saturday as our busiest day. Domo helped us readjust our staffing to take full advantage of our Sunday sales,” said Mariah Ballard, director of specialty cheese for Harmons Grocery.

In addition to selling conventional items on its shelves, Harmons is known for its fresh-made products and specialty items. With Domo, Harmons can ensure it offers the right items at the right time without creating food waste.

“We have over 200 specialty cheeses in our stores. Before Domo, we would routinely either run out of items because we under-ordered or have to throw items away because we over-ordered. By having Domo, we’ve seen our sales numbers multiply by having the right stock conditions,” said Ballard.

Domo helps Harmons better understand its sales trends so it can offer the freshest foods possible. Before Domo, Harmons might see that a store sells 80 pounds of mozzarella a week, causing the cheese department to make a single, large batch on Monday. With Domo, Harmons can see that most of that cheese is sold on the weekend, enabling the company to make a smaller batch on Monday for the weekday crowd and a larger batch on Thursday for the weekend.

“Not only that, but we can see that we sell three times more mozzarella in summer than in January, so we’re not just keeping the same order every single week. We now know the right amount of perishables to make each day,” said Ballard. “And for holiday items that sell only once a year, we can know when we need to start offering and promoting those items.”

In the kitchen, Domo is used to understand which premade items its cooks should focus on making, helping ensure the right items are on the shelves while reducing food waste.

“Before Domo, we would make as many sandwiches as we could, and often throw away about half of what we produced. You’re not going to make any sort of margin when you’re throwing away half of what you produce. Using Domo, we’ve been able to cut down the amount of sandwiches we throw away from 50% to 5% while maintaining full shelves,” said Jordan Olson, kitchen manager at Harmons Grocery.