CHICAGO -- Information Resources, Inc., a provider of consumer, shopper and retail market intelligence and insights, has announced that O'Reilly Automotive, Inc. is the latest retailer to implement the IRI space planning software suite, including Apollo Designer Workstation and Apollo Professional, to optimize category assortments and planograms for its 1,700 stores.

"O'Reilly's goal is to provide the ultimate customer shopping experience to each and every customer we serve," said Ted Wise, chief operating officer and co-president of O'Reilly Automotive, Inc. "Our new relationship with IRI is extremely valuable, as it will enable our organization to customize shelf assortment and shelf merchandising plans at the local and store level to better meet the needs of O'Reilly's customers."

Apollo Designer Workstation is an easy-to-use shelf assortment and space planning solution that leverages rules-based optimization to revolutionize the retail space planning process. It combines assortment, capacity and merchandising rules to automatically generate unique assortments and planograms for each store.

Recognizing that critical factors such as income, education and ethnicity drive purchasing habits, and that addressing space planning at the regional level is no longer adequate, Apollo Designer Workstation makes cluster- and store-level space planning a reality that was not attainable with manual or one-size-fits-all approaches. Users can rapidly model and evaluate merchandising and assortment rules, eliminate unproductive inventory, select optimal planograms and generate higher revenue and profitability, IRI said.

"The IRI space planning solutions will empower O'Reilly towards their consumer-centric merchandising objectives on a large scale and recognize sales benefits immediately," said IRI Retail Solutions and Strategic Consulting President Thom Blischok. "According to O'Reilly, their customers have grown to expect superior service, and the Apollo solutions will not only help O'Reilly meet these demands but will take their customers' shopping experience to the next level."

For more information about IRI, go to: http://us.infores.com/page/retailers/consumerretailexecution.