How to Automate ECRS CATAPULT

The lane, the back office and the web cart are one system

CATAPULT is the retail management platform from ECRS, and its argument is that the lane, the back office, the online cart and the loyalty programme should be one system rather than four with syncs running at night. Independent grocers, natural food stores, co-ops and specialty food retailers are its home ground.

That matters more in grocery than in most retail, because a grocery store is not one shop. It is a produce department buying twice a week, a deli weighing and dating its own labels, a centre store on delivery days, direct store delivery vendors who stock their own shelves, a membership register if the store is a co-op, and a web cart that has to know what is on the shelf right now.

CATAPULT carries all of that: the item file, perpetual inventory, the customers, the promotions and the reporting over the top.

Grocery is a penny business run on other people's numbers

A store scans ten thousand items on a Saturday and makes its money on the gap between two numbers, neither of which it sets.

The distributor's order guide changes cost on a few hundred items a week, and the notice is a file somebody has to go and look at. A promotion ran, the sales happened, and whether the billback was ever actually credited is a question answered on the vendor's portal by a person with a login. A manufacturer publishes a recall on a Thursday afternoon and the product is on an end cap. The store across the intersection took thirty cents off a gallon of milk and you will hear about it from a customer. Your own listings on the delivery apps show four items unavailable that are sitting in aisle six.

Each of those lives on a different website, and none of them is going to email you.

ECRS CATAPULT

Cost increases caught before the ad Distributor order guides read the morning they change, with the new costs lined up against the retails you are about to print.

Billbacks that actually arrive Promotions checked on the vendor portal against what you really sold on deal, so a credit that never landed is chased in the same month.

Recalls matched to shelf and basket Published notices compared against the item file and against loyalty history, so the end cap is cleared and the buyers can be identified.

DemandFill writes the order the shelf is asking for

CATAPULT already takes a serious amount of guesswork out of ordering, and a store should have it configured properly before adding anything around it.

Perpetual inventory automation is the base: stock moves as items scan, with no count required to keep it honest. DemandFill 3.0 sits on that and uses predictive analytics to build automated orders, aimed at fewer stockouts and less overstock than a reorder point manages. Gateway, the built-in EDI, connects the store straight to suppliers for ordering, shipping notifications, invoices, price and cost updates and digital rebates. Item Grading scores every item A through F on five measures at once: gross margin contribution, velocity, gross revenue, department rank and basket performance, which turns the argument about what to cut into a list. Fresh Item Management applies shelf life limits and sell-by dating to perishables and prepared foods. CATAPULT HHT builds purchase orders, checks prices and prints labels from the sales floor.

All of it works on what has passed through your own scanners or your own EDI trading partners.

What it cannot do is open a website that is neither of those.

A store that price-checks itself before its customers do

A competitor drops a price on Tuesday morning and nothing in the store notices until a shopper mentions it.

Competitor shelf prices on the sixty items shoppers actually notice, read off the other stores' own sites and delivery listings each week, so a milk price that moved on Tuesday is known on Tuesday. Your own listings on the delivery marketplaces checked against the shelf, so items showing unavailable online while sitting in aisle six get fixed before the weekend.

Distributor order guides read the morning the costs change, with increases lined up against your current retails, so items that have quietly gone upside down are a list rather than a discovery at inventory. Promotional billbacks checked on the vendor portal against what you really sold on deal, so a credit that never came is chased in the month it was earned.

Recall notices matched against the item file and against loyalty purchase history, so the product comes off the end cap today and the households that bought one can be identified. Inspection results and licence renewals read where the county publishes them.

Keep the customer contact supervised. A recall message to shoppers is drafted by the machine and sent by a person.

Nothing on that list needs a grocer's judgement

It needs somebody willing to open the same eleven websites in the same order every Monday and write down what moved. That is a task with a procedure, not a decision.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens CATAPULT, the distributor's portal, a competitor's site or the delivery marketplace dashboard, reads what is there and hands you what disagrees.

Because it drives the browser rather than an API, a vendor portal built for a person with a password is as reachable as one with a documented integration. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything going out to a shopper or a vendor is drafted for you.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.