Essay on Buisness Developement

Submitted By Themout03
Words: 1284
Pages: 6

3.1.1 - What is Management saying about your company? | Copy the item from the MD&A and paste it below. | In Fiscal 2011, we increased our focus on differentiating Advance from our competition through our commitment to exceptional service which is reflected in our new customer promise – 'Service is our best part®' – and the simplification of our previous four key strategies into two strategies – Service Leadership and Superior Availability. Superior Availability centers on product availability and maximizing the speed, reliability and efficiency of our supply chain. Service Leadership leverages our product availability in addition to more consistent execution to strengthen our integrated operating approach of serving our DIY and Commercial customers whether in our stores or on-line. Through these two key strategies, we believe we can continue to build on the initiatives discussed below and produce favorable financial results over the long-term. Our Commercial sales, as a percentage of total sales, increased to 37% for Fiscal 2011 as compared to 34% in Fiscal 2010. Since 2008 we completed incremental investments in additional parts professionals, delivery trucks and drivers in a significant number of our AAP stores with Commercial programs. We decelerated the pace of these investments during Fiscal 2011 to focus and achieve better execution in those areas we believe have a direct impact on customer satisfaction for both our Commercial and DIY customers such as labor scheduling, training, commercial delivery speed and accuracy and increased advertising. Our e-commerce operations continue to supplement our store sales growth through an increase in DIY sales from our AdvanceAutoParts.com website and more recently through the added capability for our Commercial customers to order product on-line. On an ongoing basis, we closely monitor independent customer satisfaction scores for both Commercial and DIY customers as a measure of customer service and product availability. Our Commercial and DIY sales and total gross profit have benefited from our added parts availability and merchandising initiatives. We continue to expand our supply chain network to increase our ability to get the right product to our customers in a timely manner. We upgraded the inventory levels in 814 of our stores during Fiscal 2011 and added 68 stores to our HUB store network during Fiscal 2011 bringing the total number of HUBs to 294. Our HUB stores stock a wider selection and greater supply of inventory and provide same-day delivery to our other stores or customers in their respective areas. We plan to open our ninth AAP distribution center in Remington, Indiana during the third quarter of Fiscal 2012. This new facility will provide productivity improvements resulting from the added capacity and a more advanced distribution system. We continue to increase the amount of product we source globally, which we believe will improve our gross profit across numerous product categories and allow us to more quickly source the products our customers need. We anticipate that the pace of our growth in Commercial will continue to exceed the pace of our DIY growth. The continued growth in our Commercial sales emphasizes our focus on an integrated service model and our goal of achieving a 50/50 mix of Commercial and DIY sales. We believe our current initiatives are a key for our long-term sales growth and improvement in our gross profit rate. Combined with our focus on balancing support and discretionary expenses with the additional cost of investments in our key strategies, we are committed to achieving our longer-term growth and profitability goals. |

3.1.2 | Five Ws and One H | Form 10-K MD&A | Outside Source Material | | Paste information from the 10K in this column. | Paste information from outside sources in this column. Include the source link. | A | In your own words describe the item? | AAP plans to open its 9th distribution center in | | B |