This retailer experienced a significant shift in delivery from physical retail channels to online, mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This shift required a future proof planning tool to support their ambitious growth plans and help obtain a deeper understanding of the drivers of demand. Moreover, there was a large dependency on Excel which created latency and siloed processes.
o9 Digital Brain for Home Personal Care
A transformative beauty leader. The company markets a total of 15 brands, covering 2000 SKUs, and uses a wide variety of distribution channels: mass market, hair and beauty salons, and selective distribution for various brands
Sustainability Impact
Reduction of product waste and reduction of inventory.
Business Scope Challenges
Demand Sensing
This company lacked a comprehensive understanding of the main drivers of demand for the five channels the company is responsible for.
Opportunity
With o9, this company deployed demand sensing features to understand the drivers behind the growing channel shift across e-commerce, modern trade and general trade channels.
Planning Granularity
The company was unable to plan at the desired level of granularity, causing shortages and delivery delays.
Opportunity
With o9, the company is able to determine the right level to forecast at, and perform demand planning with high granularity for all 2000 SKUs.
Manually Intensive Planning
Demand planners were spending the majority of their time crunching Excel spreadsheets, unable to allocate the time to focus on higher level strategic tasks. Many manual interventions were needed, a prime example being estimating the effect of New Product Introductions.
Opportunity
With o9, the company can remove low value manual work by enabling data-driven exception workflows and ML-based New Product Introduction forecasting.
Value Delivery
Key Functionalities Implemented
The company is using the o9 Enterprise Knowledge Graph to build demand models, allowing it to run key demand planning processes for all product lines in a single integrated platform. Moreover, o9 will leverage its open architecture to ensure data integration with Matelabs.ai.
Systems Replaced
Excel.
Customer Benefits
Success Factors — 3 reasons why o9 was selected
- Flexibility of having a platform, rather than a product, which permits modeling flexibility.
- o9’s knowledge and experience in the CPG market in combination with great team work.
- The quality of o9’s Use Cases which were demonstrated in the platform and presented as processes, which the competition (Anaplan & JDA) was lacking.
KPI Impacted
- Significant improvement of the understanding of the drivers of demand.
- Increased forecast accuracy.
- Improvement of process orchestration, resulting in winning back valuable time.
