o9 Digital Brain for Publishing

One of the biggest book publishers in the world. With over 24,000 employees operating in 70 countries, it combines world-class educational content and assessment powered by services and technology to enable more effective teaching and personalized learning at scale.

This company needed to bring multiple, disparate data sources together onto a single platform that provides the automation of dynamic and agile data analytics. Leveraging such a platform would increase efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency in the S&OP process.

Sustainability Impact

Better obsolescence projection and recovery (e.g. reclaim obsolete kit components), phase-in of newer editions, phase-out of older editions more efficiently.

Business Scope Challenges

Deivers of Demand

The company had a limited ability to quickly understand key trends in its product categories and update demand planning.

Opportunity

With o9, they can now plan and include key drivers of demand at the ISBN level (~300K ISBNs). They implemented a multidimensional model with attribute- based aggregation and disaggregation to analyze and enrich demand planning.

Demand/Supply Matching

Long lead times and a complex supply chain made supply and demand matching a resource-intensive, time-consuming effort. This led to the inability to review detailed pegging information that connected original demand to final supply.

Opportunity

With o9, the company can perform end-to- end pegging, responding to demand with visible supply pipelines, effective utilization of available capacity, and scenario modeling to evaluate multiple options to solve shortages quickly.

Time-consuming S&OP Reviews

The company spent significant manual effort and time preparing for S&OP reviews across product, demand, and supply, having many different source systems.

Opportunity

With o9, it is leveraging the live o9 Platform as the review tool for S&OP meetings. This is possible as o9 provides the primary engagement system for all SCP-related data, eclipsing the source systems such as Logility for Demand Planning and Oracle ASCP for Supply Planning.

Value Delivery

Key Functionalities Implemented

The company is using the o9 Enterprise Knowledge Graph as a read-only system which takes demand and supply plans as inputs to help in Integrated Business Planning (IBP) and demonstrate the gaps, shortages, KPIs, etc. The views set up on the o9 platform help the planners and management make informed decisions on forecast enrichment, measure and track KPIs, procurement, kitting and dekitting, destroy actions, and track (and avoid) obsolescence and deterioration.

Systems Replaced

Excel.

Customer Benefits

Success Factors — 3 reasons why o9 was selected 

  1. One system of engagement for all supply chain-related data – replacing the source systems, i.e., Logility for Demand and Oracle ASCP for Supply.
  2. Visualization - shift away from creating manual reports to analyzing exceptions like supply-demand mismatch and supply projections.
  3. Increased effectiveness and efficiency - convey analytical information in the S&OP process without significant manual effort.

KPI Impacted

  1. Reduction in obsolescence due to increased visibility, better forecasting, and tighter supply planning decisions.
  2. A reduction in COGS from repurposing IRCS, re-stickering between loose- leaf and print offer, and effective use of print gang-runs.
  3. The efficiency gained from using the o9 tool allows for savings to be made in FTE.

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