Costco, IRI update Costco CRX program

CHICAGO — Costco and IRI announced Wednesday that they will change a program that the club retailer describes as a single, global solution for category, point-of-sale and supply chain tracking, as well as extend the program to Mexico.

The two companies announced "significant enhancements" to the Costco Collaborative Retail Exchange platform, which was launched in 2004 to give manufacturers a detailed means of tracking business at the chain, using a single tool to get a full view of the company's global business. The program was migrated to the Liquid Data technology platform in 2012, enabling faster insights.

"Costco is excited to debut the updated Costco CRX program as our enhanced data and technology will make it even easier for our valued manufacturer comity to obtain specific, real-time information about their business at Costco," IRI EVP retail client solutions Brad Shelton said. "Costco is consistently impressed with IRI's ability to transform our POS information into actionable business insights for manufacturers, and we're confident that the platform's new global POS and supply chain management capabilities will further improve our manufactures' communications and overall success in Costco stores."

The enhancements include a Category Tools service. Previously, vendors could only access their own data, but Category Tools allows them to measure performance against the rest of their category. In addition, the company has expanded the program to Mexico by launching Costco CRX Mexico, citing its success in the United States and Canada of enlisting 750 global vendors to participate.

"The Costco CRX platform has been a tremendous success in the United States and Canada, so we're thrilled to be able to offer our manufactures in Mexico the same quality solution and enable a more global view of Costco's sales," Costco Mexico director of sales Mark Feldman said.