The Country Range Group has continued its ethos of rewarding employees for their hard work and promoting from within after announcing that Katrina Crabtree has been promoted to Head of Commercial & Data at the wholesale foodservice buying group.
Crabtree has been with CRG for over 17 years and has become an integral part of the senior management team.
Introducing the new CRG Directory
As well as still working with a selection of key branded suppliers, Katrina will also be leading CRG’s innovative new systems and data projects department, which has received significant investment over the past year and has been highlighted as an area for investment through the Group’s recent strategic review.
The new department has focused its resource on the development of the brand new CRGDirectory system, a bespoke platform for CRG members to access a number of different portals, all of which create efficiencies for several departments and also helps the central office team to automate many of its existing processes.
A brand new, upgraded trading focused Intranet, which is accessed via the CRGDirectory, went live in February. This is a replacement of the Group’s existing system with significant improvements to user experience and search functionality, as well as plans for additional portals relating to technical and complaints processes in the future.
CRG Hub and Product Information Management
The other portal that members can access via the CRGDirectory is a brand new marketing assets library known as the CRGHub. This has recently been launched to members and will facilitate more effective use of the vast number of assets created by the Group, whether that is Country Range brand related photography, videography, sales support tools or industry insights and reports. The Group’s suppliers have also been invited to provide assets and tools that can be viewed and downloaded within the system, again creating efficiencies for the central office, members and suppliers too.
Elsewhere, the Group has significantly increased the investment into the existing PIM (Product Information Management) system to move it to an upgraded platform. The data is currently being enriched with over 60 additional fields giving members a wider breadth of product data. Country Range brand products are being enriched first and this will be followed by commodities, and then brands later in 2023. CRG’s members are utilising the knowledge and expertise across the Group and working together on a larger data validation project.
Quality of data continues to be of the highest priority for the Group in 2023. In addition to the central office, suppliers are increasingly utilising the data that is provided to them via the CRGInsight data platform and CRG are working with them to improve the product categorisation. There are 4 new customer categories that have gone live from January 2023. CRG also expect to be commercialising the data with an additional 10 suppliers this year.
Finally, Crabtree’s department will also be implementing a new Enable rebate management system which will give enhanced member tracking, reporting and efficiencies for central office. The member dashboard is brand new to Enable and is currently in final testing phase. Following CRG’s initial internal validation processes, they will be contacting suppliers in early March to test the system ahead of a full launch in April 2023.
Martin Ward, Country Range Group Chief Executive, said:
“In her 17 years at CRG, Katrina has become an important member of the central office team and an expert in her field. She’s highly regarded by everyone she works with and is also a crucial part of the senior management team so we’re thrilled she has agreed to become Head of Commercial & Data. With so much happening to our data and systems over the coming year for our members and suppliers, it’s imperative that the transition is managed as smoothly as possible and I have all the confidence in Katrina to deliver.”
Delivering Our Members Leading Data
With data now firmly embedded in Central Office, we continuously look to adopt the latest technology to take data to the next level, find out more about how our data driven approach supports our members to make informed decisions.
