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Grocery

Clearing the Bottlenecks: How One of Canada’s Largest Retailers Streamlined Its Supply Chain

Managing a complex network of over 400 stores—spanning everything from apparel and electronics to groceries and pharmacies—is no easy task. For this major Canadian retailer, volatile network flows caused constant bottlenecks, disrupting labor and transportation planning. Discover how they partnered with o9 Solutions to ditch the spreadsheets, leveraging an ML-powered logistics forecast to smooth demand, align capacity, and drastically lower both out-of-stocks and transportation costs.

Near-term network flow volatility caused bottlenecks and created challenges with labor and transportation planning. The goal was to improve on-shelf availability by demand smoothing and alignment of labor and transportation capacity.

Sustainability impact

Less transportation and avoidance of expedites.

challenges

Complexity to Clarity

Challenge

The company was challenged with moving goods efficiently while at the same time reacting to merchant asks. They needed to evaluate levers such as adjusting demands or adding another shift at the DC, accessing the temp labor pool, or accessing flex transportation capacity.

Solution

With o9, the company was able to create a logistics forecast by taking the previous year's data and applying ML algorithms that were enriched based on future events that the merchants had planned. Scenario planning

Value Delivery

Systems Replaced

  • Excel
  • PowerPoint

Key Functionalities Implemented

The o9 knowledge graph was used to build fully integrated E2E flow planning models and ML-based logistics forecasting. This allows for efficiently managing the volume the DC has to manage on a day-to-day basis. The plan drives alignment between capacity and demand, and smoothing of flow based on revised capacities and merchant priorities.

Customer Benefits

success factors

  • Optimal DC labor plans, outbound/inbound transportation plans, store receiving labor plans, and DC storage plans.
  • The ability to have a single connected system between forecasting and the fulfillment system.
  • Export outputs from o9 to drive downstream functions such as workforce planning.

KPI Impacted

  • Lower transportation costs.
  • Lower labor costs.
  • Lower out-of-stocks in the store.
O9 whitepaper retail grocery mockup

Evolve or fall behind: The choice retailers must make in the age of ‘never normal’

Read our white paper to learn how AI/ML can evolve your supply chain and give you a competitive advantage.

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