This customer was growing quickly and their existing
demand and supply planning processes could not support this growth due to a high dependency on manual activities and Excel spreadsheets.
o9 Digital Brain for Chemical
One of India’s largest paint manufacturers and with a presence in multiple countries. It serves both B2C and B2B business segments such as Decorative, Automotive and General Industrial, and Coatings.
Sustainability Impact
Reduction of inventory, logistic expedites, obsolescence, and waste.
Business Scope Challenges
Forecast Accuracy
Primarily relied on the AOP to determine future demand, meaning they were unable to keep up with the latest market trends. There was limited collaboration between sales, marketing and supply chain teams. This added inaccuracy to a heavily regional, promo-driven market.
Opportunity
With o9, advanced ML analytics and consensus forecasting capabilities were leveraged to drive improvements in forecast accuracy.
Intensive Manual Planning
The stocking of depots was controlled by basic automation and overridden by sales team-based manual replenishment requests. This generated slow-moving inventory and stockouts.
Opportunity
With o9, manual work was removed and a complete overview was generated by using o9’s integrated platform for inventory planning, procurement planning, and master planning.
Limited Planning Horizon/Siloed Planning
With a limited planning horizon (one month) and a weekly production plan, the procurement teams struggled to estimate the inventory requirements for raw materials. This lead to stockouts or excess inventory with teams operating in silos.
Opportunity
With o9, this company was able to leverage o9’s optimization engine. This provided an efficient way to arrive at inventory requirements based on matching demand, supply, and inventory levels across time horizons.
Value Delivery
Key Functionalities Implemented
The Enterprise Knowledge Graph was used to implement a complete E2E IBP process. This includes demand planning in collaboration with sales and marketing, distribution planning, master planning, procurement planning, and S&OP.
Systems Replaced
Manual XLS-based planning and
homegrown products.
Customer Benefits
Success Factors — 3 reasons why o9 was selected
- Deep industry knowledge in the paint industry with o9’s future-proof innovations and the ability to support advanced analytics.
- Single integrated platform for all planning processes.
- Ability to accommodate the specific needs for customization, a modern user experience with multiple ways to connect and plan using Excel, browser, or mobile.
KPI Impacted
- Reduction in inventory, specifically slow-moving inventory.
- Reduction in lost sales.
- Improved forecast accuracy.