From Adriatic Shores to Automated Stores: How Studenac Market Conquered Seasonal Chaos Across 1,000+ Locations
About Studenac Market
One of the top national chains with the largest sales network in Croatia, Studenac Market currently operates more than a thousand stores. It is the leading retail chain on the Adriatic Coast, selling various seasonal and non-seasonal products. A significant portion of their stores are seasonal due to the touristic nature of the region, making effective inventory planning and optimization a critical part of their business.
Benefits
8x
Planner Productivity Boost
81%
User Acceptance Rate
8%
Availability Improvement
15%
Excess Stock Reduction
55%
Decrease in Lost Sales
8x planner productivity boost. 81% user acceptance rate. 55% decrease in lost sales. When Croatia’s largest Adriatic retail chain partnered with Solvoyo to automate supply chain planning across its 1,000+ store network, the results spoke for themselves, and they spoke fast.
1,500+
Seasonal Products
1,000+
Stores
14,000+
Active SKUs
550
Vendors
Multiple
DCs
The Story
On the Croatian Adriatic Coast, retail doesn’t follow a calendar; it follows the tides. When summer tourists flood seaside towns, demand for everyday essentials can surge 3 to 5 times overnight. And when the season ends, those same shelves need to quietly reset for a different kind of customer entirely.
For Studenac Market, one of Croatia’s top national chains and the leading retailer on the Adriatic Coast, this wasn’t a seasonal inconvenience; it was the defining challenge of the business. With more than a thousand stores, many of them seasonal by nature, Studenac had to get the right products to the right locations at the right time, every single day, across a portfolio of 14,000+ SKUs sourced from 550 vendors and flowing through multiple distribution centers.
And for a long time, most of that planning happened manually.
When Manual Planning Meets a 5x Demand Surge
Behind the scenes, Studenac’s supply chain relied heavily on experience and manual effort. Replenishment decisions were made without a unified system, and the technology backbone was non-standardized. This, combined with inconsistent data, made unified decision-making very difficult.
The cracks showed in predictable ways: excess stock sitting in the wrong locations, lost sales from products that didn’t arrive in time, and planning teams stretched thin trying to keep up with a network that had long outgrown its tools.
When summer hit and demand multiplied across the coast, the pressure wasn’t just operational; it was existential. A tourist who walks into a store and doesn’t find what they need doesn’t come back tomorrow. They walk next door.
Studenac needed more than incremental improvement. It needed a platform that could handle the complexity of seasonal and non-seasonal products across 1,000+ stores, and it needed it fast.
Building the Backbone: Solvoyo's Approach
The partnership with Solvoyo began with an honest assessment of the foundation. Before automating anything, the platform needed clean, connected data. Solvoyo’s team worked to minimize the complexity of Studenac’s fragmented data environment, enhancing data quality and building an intelligent backbone, a single source of truth that could power every planning decision downstream.
From there, the transformation followed Solvoyo’s integrated approach: a configurable, Lego-like platform customized for Studenac’s unique operating reality. This wasn’t a generic rollout. It was built to account for the nuances that make Studenac’s business distinct, the seasonal store profiles, the mixed delivery model (DC shipments alongside direct-to-store), the wildly variable demand patterns across regions, and the sheer diversity of a 14,000+ SKU portfolio.
The implementation had to be fast. With 1,000+ stores and multiple DCs to transform, Studenac couldn’t afford a multi-year rollout. Solvoyo’s built-in configurable and Lego-like capabilities allowed the platform to be integrated and customized to Studenac’s needs at speed, bringing automated replenishment, demand planning, and supply optimization online across the entire network.
The result was an automated replenishment model capable of managing both seasonal and non-seasonal products and stores on a single platform, replacing manual decisions with data-driven ones, and replacing fragmented tools with full visibility into supply chain operations and business KPIs.
The Results: Planning in Hours, Not Days
The numbers tell a compelling story:
- 8x Planner Productivity Boost: Planning teams that once spent entire days managing replenishment manually now operate at eight times the efficiency, freeing capacity for strategic decisions instead of firefighting.
- 81% User Acceptance Rate: Studenac’s planners trust the system. More than four out of five recommendations are accepted and executed without any modification from the planners, a strong signal that the platform is producing decisions aligned with real-world constraints.
- 15% Excess Stock Reduction: Less capital tied up in the wrong inventory, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
- 55% Decrease in Lost Sales: The metric that matters most in a tourism-driven market. Products are on shelves when customers walk through the door.
- 8% Availability Improvement: Higher on-shelf availability across the network, driving both revenue and customer satisfaction.
Beyond the Numbers
What the KPIs don’t fully capture is the operational shift underneath. Studenac went from a fragmented, manually driven planning environment to a digitally unified operation with full traceability and visibility. Planners went from reactive exception managers to strategic decision-makers. Store managers went from manually coordinating direct shipments to working within an intelligent system that handles the complexity for them.
For a retailer whose business literally changes with the seasons, this kind of agility isn’t a luxury; it’s the foundation for growth.
Solutions
About
Studenac Market
One of the top national chains with the largest sales network in Croatia, Studenac Market currently operates more than a thousand stores. It is the leading retail chain on the Adriatic Coast, selling various seasonal and non-seasonal products. A significant portion of their stores are seasonal due to the touristic nature of the region, making effective inventory planning and optimization a critical part of their business.
Benefits
8x
Planner Productivity Boost
81%
User Acceptance Rate
8%
Availability Improvement
15%
Excess Stock Reduction
55%
Decrease in Lost Sales
Michał Halwa
CFO, Studenac Market
"Solvoyo is not just a great platform to support your replenishment process. It is also a great team to support you with insights and guidance on the road to improved efficiency. A true partnership."
Solvoyo delivers state-of-the-art Supply Chain solutions in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host our cloud infrastructure and accelerate the digital transformation journey of our customers with seamless scalability. AWS is a secure and reliable cloud services platform offering strong computing power, database storage, and other functionality to enable us to offer cutting-edge technology, and to grow along with our customers.