How o9 Delivers Significant Value: Insights and Quotes from aim10x Dallas 2024

aim10x Dallas 2024 brought together visionary leaders transforming their organizations by addressing the root causes of value leakage in their operations. The event highlighted the significant business value—often amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars annually—that can be captured by optimizing planning and decision-making processes. Through collaborative partnerships, o9 helps its customers bridge the critical silos within their organizations, enabling them to manage complexity and volatility more effectively and unlock significant value through better, faster decision-making.

Below, we share several of the most inspiring and impactful quotes from aim10x Dallas.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) Configure-to-Order business is highly complex. Ninety percent of order configurations are new, making demand forecasting extremely challenging due to a lack of sales history. This complexity leads to significant value leakage due to lost sales. The root cause lies in the lack of connectivity between HPE's commercial and supply chain teams.

Brian Louis, Senior Director of the Global Supply Chain Center of Excellence at HPE, shared how they are overcoming these challenges by leveraging the o9 platform to integrate commercial data from Salesforce and applying advanced analytics to improve demand forecasting and decision-making.

"The best source is deal information from Salesforce. Being able to apply algorithms and analytics on deals and deal-to-order conversion is a big deal," Brian explained. Then, we can assess supply supportability for deals so that commercial and supply are much better integrated, and we can make much faster decisions."

Managing 200,000 multi-level Bills of Materials (BOMs) adds another layer of complexity. Brian emphasized the importance of visualizing these BOMs and gaining accurate visibility into the supply chain. "Visualizing the BOMs, understanding how it all flows through the supply chain, and having accurate visibility has proven to be a win."

PepsiCo

Operating in 200 markets worldwide, PepsiCo faces inherent planning complexity due to diverse market requirements, cultures, and unique needs.

The o9 platform is live in several of the company's major markets. "We’re live in Spain, Portugal, and Turkey while implementing it in the U.S. for snacks and beverages, France, and Benelux, and getting LATAM ready for it," PepsiCo's Srikanth Bollavaram and Byron Johnson explained.

To drive this global rollout, they discussed how the food and beverage giant is implementing a global design process for the o9 platform that all markets can adopt, helping them manage complexity and reduce value leakage. "We have put together a global design process and approach that all these markets can adopt," the two explained.

They also highlighted the power of scenario planning, which allows the company to simulate 'what-if' plans that maximize or minimize certain variables, such as sustainability impact. "We run 'what-if' scenarios and can even assess the sustainability impact of these scenarios."

Premier Nutrition

Premier Nutrition, experiencing rapid growth with a 20% CAGR since 2019, recognized the need to optimize its planning processes to prevent value leakage. During aim10x Dallas, they shared how establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) has been pivotal in driving continuous improvement and empowering their team.

"We’ve built up an entire CoE organization to own post-implementation services, training, and new capabilities," they explained. "What’s exciting at Premier Nutrition is that the CoE trains and educates SMEs to increase the organization's knowledge base. The CoE also looks at the non-value-added tasks the planners are working on and helps them move their workload to value-adding tasks. We also continue to find activities we can automate."

Acuity Brands

Acuity Brands, a leader in lighting, controls, and building management, needed to address value leakage resulting from disconnected business planning processes and inefficient resource utilization. Matthew Gillett, Acuity's VP of Product Management, shared how the company achieved substantial financial benefits by implementing an Integrated Business Planning (IBP) capability and focusing on key operational metrics like error percentage, bias, and mix accuracy.

Some KPI highlights from Matthews presentation:
Investment thesis: Over 400% ROI, and Over 250% IRR over 3 years.
Gross margin %: Contributed to almost 400Bps of improvements over 3 years
Total inventory: Contributed to almost 20 days of improvement over 3 years
Time: Reduction in planning organization data prep time
Service On Time metrics: 20% increase

URBN

URBN, the parent company of brands such as Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People, faced challenges due to rapid growth and the rigidity of legacy planning systems. At aim10x Dallas, the company's Director of Merchandising IT Jess Loreaux discussed how URBN sought a flexible solution that could evolve with their business needs.

"o9 is a flexible tool where we could create various processes tailored to our specific brands," she explained. "With o9, we can seamlessly integrate the outputs of the models into our planning processes."

By adopting a flexible, future-proof platform, URBN is effectively managing complexity and preventing value leakage across its portfolio of diverse and rapidly evolving brands.

Transforming planning & decision-making is not easy, but knowing that we are making a big difference to these FT500 companies makes it all meaningful. The insights shared at aim10x Dallas 2024 affirm this mission. By focusing on adopting innovative technologies, we are enabling our customers to manage complexity more effectively and unlock significant value through better, faster decisions.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all the speakers and attendees who made the event successful. Your journeys inspire us to continue pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Together, we're not just improving businesses—we're revolutionizing industries by turning value leakage into value capture.

To all of our (to be) customers, thank you for being a part of our "aim10x" journey. We're excited to continue creating value by transforming planning and decision-making processes at forward-thinking enterprises.

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