People to Watch 2016: Kate McAuley, Walgreens

Kate McAuley likes wide-open spaces, organizing them and using them for efficient traffic movement and merchandising. She has been working on store floor formats since 2013, first with Abercrombie & Fitch and now with Walgreens. The Miami University (Ohio) graduate says that since she is no IT whiz or mathematician, her favorite project has been to develop the drug chain’s macro space optimization tool.She started at Walgreens in 2014 as a store format insight analyst, jumped to senior analyst of store format insights, and last February became manager of space management. At A&F she represented the inventory management perspective for all product categories within the A&F men’s business and, along with her counterparts from planning and visual merchandising, would deliver the upcoming products and floorsets to the CEO and senior leadership biweekly.In her first roles with Walgreens, McAuley developed strategy, business rules and execution plans across various store remodel initiatives. Once the project was executed in-store, she reviewed post analytics to determine the performance of the project and identify trends, successes and opportunities across the program that could be applied to future initiatives.As a manager on the space management team, she’s been using the knowledge of analytics, space optimization tools and store formats all gained through her previous positions. She says she’s been working on the development of the chain’s proprietary space optimization tool since she got to Walgreens. She and a small team have been working to build out a more advanced version of the tool, which simplifies the optimization process and provides more relevant and accurate space recommendations by store. “From the rule sets and logic to the user interface to the testing, I have had the opportunity to see the development of this tool from the very beginning through the rollout, and I couldn’t be more proud of the work the team and I have done,” says McAuley.“Through the development of the optimization tool, Walgreens will be able to make better, data-driven space decisions that improve solutions for our customers and make our stores more productive. Creating this optimization tool pushed me outside of my comfort zone. It challenged me to think differently about the way space optimization is done and pushed me to identify process, reporting and usability improvements, which was something I had not previously done on such a large scale.”McAuley is also pleased to have been involved in the integration of urban Duane Reade stores. Walgreens bought the New York-based drug chain in 2010 and set to create tailored assortment and space offerings based on urban locations. “An added layer of complexity was that these stores still had Duane Reade specific planograms that were quite different than the Walgreens catalog, so we had to convert those planograms as well as allocate the appropriate amount of space by category to maximize productivity,” McAuley says. “It was one of the most complex and comprehensive initiatives I’ve ever worked on.”Initially, McAuley and her colleagues identified different types of urban stores and began to identify what offerings should be different based on the customers. “Does the neighborhood Duane Reade store that has mostly local shoppers need to have the same offering as the Duane Reade store near a transit hub or a tourist destination?” she says. “If so, what specific categories should differ and what should the differences be? Those were questions that I had to answer. Through a mix of sales data, customer insights, store operations feedback and market trend data, we were able to build out a holistic solution for our stores and customers.”McAuley says the positive experiences she’s had with bosses inspire her future goals. “In the next five years, my main goal for myself is to become a well-respected, effective leader and mentor,” she says. “Throughout my career, I’ve learned that strong leadership and effective managers have such a positive influence on the work culture and team member output, so I would like to be able to lead a team in such a way.”

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