o9 Digital Brain for Apparel & Footware

A world leader in innovative casual footwear for men, women, and children. The company offers a broad portfolio of all-season products, while remaining true to its core molded footwear heritage.

This customer needed to connect top-down and bottom-up planning, lower inventory turns while retaining great margins and bring additional personalization and speed-to-market to consumers across a variety of different distribution channels.

Sustainability Impact

Reduction of inventory, efficient capacity utilization, and reduced multi-node excess transfers.

Business Scope Challenges

Holistic Planning

It was a struggle to link top-down planning to sales and inventory planning within a monthly cycle.

Opportunity

With o9’s Enterprise Knowledge Graph, the company is able to connect the dots for holistic planning, effectively ensure alignment in execution of the plan, and is able to make decisions based on real-time insights when corrections are necessary.

Forecast Accuracy

This company struggled to achieve a high forecast accuracy experiencing high demand volatility, short product life cycles, and a variety of global marketplaces.

Opportunity

With o9, it was able to implement attribute-based planning, increase efficiency in usage of resources, and leverage ML analytics for demand-shaping capabilities. This increased its ability to quickly react to changes in demand and marketplaces.

Demand/Supply Matching

Long lead times and a complex supply chain made supply/demand matching a resource-intensive, manual effort.

Opportunity

With o9, the company was able to respond to demand with visible supply pipelines, effective utilization of available capacity, and scenario modeling to quickly evaluate multiple options to solve shortages.

Value Delivery

Key Functionalities Implemented

The o9 Enterprise Knowledge Graph was used for AI-powered demand planning to improve accuracy and reduce bias.

Intelligent supply planning provides an immediate response to demand scenarios, using o9’s advanced solvers and inventory capabilities to bring down working capital and optimize service levels.

Systems Replaced

Homegrown solutions and Excel.

Customer Benefits

Success Factors — 3 reasons why o9 was selected

  1. o9’s single interconnected platform allows for all planning processes across the business.
  2. Flexible platform and digital twin of the supply chain to address the unique challenges and opportunities of the footwear industry.
  3. Future proof platform with continuous innovation in advanced analytics, NLP, ML, and AI.

KPI Impacted

  1. Increase in inventory turns.
  2. Increase in resource efficiency.
  3. Reduction of lost sales due to stock-outs.

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