Top Growing Grocer A101 Soars with AWS Partner Solvoyo's No Touch Planning

A101, the world’s sixth fastest-growing retailer, was expanding rapidly and wanted to leverage advanced analytics and integrate and automate inventory replenishment and distribution center procurement. To optimize inventory management and enhance revenue, A101 partnered with Solvoyo, an end-to-end intelligent supply chain planning and analytics platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Solvoyo's Retail Planning Suite helped A101 accurately forecast sales, generate recommendations, and reduce reliance on manual planning. With the scalability and flexibility of AWS, Solvoyo’s autonomous supply chain hosts, transfers, processes, and analyzes massive amounts of data, helping A101 reduce stockouts by 50 percent after going live and saving millions annually. A101 has also improved distribution center efficiency so it can focus on high-converting stores.

When popular Turkish discount retailer A101 reached peak momentum in 2020 and 2021, it was opening thousands of new locations a year across the country. Despite its success, rapid growth amplified the retailer’s need to scale its planning capabilities, prioritize operational excellence, and minimize costs. These advancements would help it maintain the quality and affordability of its products. Manual data entry led to errors, empirically based purchase orders (POs) caused low availability or overstock, and adapting to supply changes was difficult.

To optimize inventory management and improve revenue, A101 had collaborated with AWS Retail Competency Partner Solvoyo, to deploy Retail Planning Suite, a platform based on AWS that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for automated end-to-end supply chain planning and analytics. Solvoyo’s Retail Planning Suite understands data in context to accurately forecast sales and generate recommendations on which products to restock. This proficiency enables A101 to reduce its reliance on human-centered planning.

Each day, Solvoyo has three hours to pull data from A101’s more than 12,000 store locations—each containing approximately 1,800 stock-keeping units (SKUs)—and generate recommendations for the next day.

“We chose AWS because of its reliability, scalability, speed, and flexibility, which we need to grow vertically and horizontally,” said Burak Sardag, infrastructure and DevOps manager at Solvoyo. “We produce 13 to 14 million decisions a day out of 100 million rows of data, running close to 80 models at any given time and thousands of parallel API calls. And we can do that within three hours.”

Solvoyo hosts all customer data on AWS using a container architecture. To store, transfer, process, and analyze data with high redundancy at the scale A101 requires, Solvoyo uses more than 50 AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), AWS Fargate, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Choosing Solvoyo for its analytics needs was a natural choice for A101. The retailer started relying on Solvoyo technology to drive its daily decisions ten years ago with great success. At the time, it deployed Solvoyo’s platform to automate the daily restocking and procurement of its roughly 1,800 items per store and reduce stockouts by 50 percent. As A101 expanded from 1,400 to 12,000+ stores, it utilized Solvoyo’s advanced analytics and planning platform.

Most recently, it employed Solvoyo’s integrated demand planning, supply chain analytics, and promotional item planning capabilities to enhance the profitability of its 6,000 promotional items, which vary across regions and shelf-space availability. These tools apply historical data analysis and ML to assess SKUs per location, automatically generating short-term sales forecasts and replenishment recommendations from point of sale (POS) data. For new locations that lack historical data, Solvoyo’s platform references similar locations and items to estimate demand for all inventory at the debut venues. With this technology, A101 simplifies and improves planning for anomalous events, such as sporting events and holidays. It later removes anomalous sales from the historical data so that it does not influence future recommendations. It has since earned a 20 percent share in total revenue for promotional items and achieved a 98 percent acceptance rate for Solvoyo’s recommendations.

During the COVID pandemic, which created anomalous demand, A101 reduced overstock to only 3 percent.

A101 relies on Solvoyo to make procurement decisions across its 56 distribution centers. Additionally, it uses Solvoyo’s dynamic allocation capabilities for insights into optimizing receipt allocation to stores, using the latest store-level demand and inventory data for fresh and promotional items. In the past, if an item was in short supply, distribution centers would distribute it randomly across stores—meaning deliveries wouldn’t always match POs.

“Now, Solvoyo handles the pre-planning, and when orders arrive, we help them manage what happens after,” said Asena Denizeri, vice president of retail solutions at Solvoyo. “This way, A101 can send more supply to the stores that are most likely to convert it to sales, rather than end up with excess stock where there might be slow churning inventory.”

This also applies to fresh food replenishment. Solvoyo’s Retail Planning Suite considers several factors in perishable item allocation, including seasonality, shelf life, and waste rates at each store.

“The flexible technical infrastructure of AWS complements Solvoyo’s customizable customer success model so we can anticipate customer needs before they happen,” said Nil Durak, chief operating officer and head of customer success at Solvoyo. “A101 can automatically execute 98 percent of supply decisions on the store side and up to 90 percent of distribution center decisions happen on Solvoyo.”

Today, A101 is the largest grocer in Turkey and one of the fastest-growing retailers in the world, generating billions in annual revenue.

“A101 achieved all this growth with only a small central planning team involved in the inventory management aspect of their operations,” Denizeri said, adding that the Solvoyo’s platform has saved the company millions in USD annually.

Solvoyo continues to grow its business through its collaboration with AWS, earning AWS Competencies in Retail and Supply Chain, and is now listed in AWS Marketplace. To deliver the best service to customers, Solvoyo ensures it consistently aligns with the newest framework and best practices from AWS.

“Because we are fully invested in AWS, we are deploying our platform not only for high-growth retailers like A101 but also for globally recognized manufacturers of consumer-packaged goods,” said Durak.