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Hardlines

Orchestrating Omnichannel Growth: How a Music Retail Giant Synchronized 300 Stores and E-Commerce

After 50 years of industry leadership, this $1.7B retailer found their growth hitting a wall due to disconnected legacy systems and "Excel-heavy" planning. Discover how they leveraged o9’s Digital Brain to achieve a unified view of "Open to Buy," bridging the gap between pre-season targets and in-season performance to drive significant improvements in gross margins and inventory turns across every channel.

This retailer’s merchandise planning system couldn’t keep pace with brand and channel needs. They experienced disconnected planning processes with suboptimal decision-making, whilst needing to manage sales for a mix of new and existing products.

Sustainability impact

Reduction of inventory.

challenges

Complexity to Clarity

Challenge

There was no holistic view of ‘Open to Buy’ across the enterprise. Existing processes focused solely on the Retail brick-and-mortar channel and were built in Excel spreadsheets that were cumbersome and prone to human error.

Solution

With o9, the company could get an omnichannel view of ‘Open to Buy’ across the Enterprise, encompassing physical stores and e-commerce channels.

Value Delivery

Systems Replaced

  • Excel

Key Functionalities Implemented

The company is using o9’s Enterprise Knowledge Graph for Merchandise Financial Planning. Key capabilities include planning across multiple dimensions of business, such as Brands, Categories, Inventory Segments, Vendors, and Private Brand, as well as omnichannel planning. Moreover, it leverages scenario planning, versioning, real-time consensus planning, ‘Open to Buy’ management, Top-Down and Bottom-Up planning, reconciliation, and approval.

Customer Benefits

success factors

  • Maximized speed to value.
  • o9 platform’s breadth and capabilities.
  • The flexibility of the platform and the ability to eliminate a wide variety of manual tasks enable employees to focus more on value-adding activities.

KPI Impacted

  • Improved Gross Margin.
  • Improved Inventory Turns.
  • Improved Inventory Turns.

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