With customers including 24 of the top 75 U.S. supermarket chains, SofTechnics will help to expand RedPrairie’s reach into the competitive grocery marketplace. On January 10, 2011 during the National Retail Federation (NRF) annual convention in New York, RedPrairie announced the completion of the acquisition of SofTechnics. (A true coincidence, the two companies’ booths were located directly next to each other on the trade show floor.)
Conversely, RedPrairie will expand SofTechnics’ reach into the growing global marketplace. RedPrairie specializes in workforce, inventory and transportation solutions serving a variety of industries in more than 40 countries. SofTechnics’ specialties range from mobility-enabled store inventory and price management, intelligent store ordering, direct-store delivery and master data management.
“This is a major win for RedPrairie and firmly establishes them in the grocery and hypermarket sectors within the store,” said Greg Buzek, President, IHL Services. “Assuming that SofTechnics is able to maintain the strong relationship with the Mettler Toledo group throughout the process, this will extend their reach. Fresh item management, where Softechnics has an offering is an area of great opportunity for retailers to add quickly to their profitability. These savings are dramatic and drop right to the bottom line.”
Executives from both RedPrairie and SofTechnics joined together to support the acquisition during the NRF event. Guy Dille, President of SofTechnics, joined Noel Goggin, Senior VP and General Manager of RedPrairie, to make the formal announcement during meetings at the convention. “We see this acquisition as a positive connection of product and people,” Goggin stated. Along with the acquisition, Dille has been appointed Senior Vice President, Retail for Red Prairie.
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For the near-term, RedPrairie has stated that it will be business as usual for both companies. “They will continue to operate as a stand-alone product suite with RedPrairie beginning the work to integrate our two companies’ suites into a stronger combined product suite,” according to a press statement from RedPrairie. “RedPrairie will continue to support both its customers as well as the SofTechnics customer base. A technology and product roadmap is in development for the future direction of RedPrairie’s solutions and longer term coexisting and convergence companies. We expect that our two products suites will become integrated to offer a strong set of products to the market than the two companies alone could. Areas of synergy and duplication will be rationalized over the upcoming product release cycles.”
