This customer had a highly manual and Excel-driven Assortment Planning process, with every country following their own method of working. This resulted in sub-optimal assortment and missed sales opportunities.
o9 Digital Brain for Assortment Planning
A global leader in optical retailing and delivers high quality and affordable eye care to more and more people around the world. Operating in more than 40 different countries and online.
Sustainability Impact
Reduction of waste due to a more accurately managed product mix on store level.
Business Scope Challenges
Planning in Silos
Every local country team followed their own assortment process, with little to no authority from the global team. There was a lack of alignment between the global team and the local planners in terms of assortment selection.
Opportunity
With o9, the company will be able to bridge the gap between global teams and local planners, connecting all planning processes for all regions on a single integrated cloud-native platform and optimizing assortment decisions in all countries.
Box and Brand Level Planning
The company experienced difficulties with planning, considering both store level assortment capacity as well as box constraints (e.g. identifying the foundation boxes or special licensed boxes). For the complete product assortment, The company has to ensure that the right product mix (on box level) is available in the stores.
Opportunity
With o9, the company is capable of managing box as well as brand planning on one integrated platform and perform analytics to help create the perfect product mix at store level.
Manual Processes
The processes for managing the pre-season and in-season demand, as well as managing the correct ‘active’ assortment in the old systems were highly manual and therefore often lacked accuracy and precision. This led to big challenges related to store replenishments.
Opportunity
With o9, the company is able to streamline
and automate these processes, without having to depend on repetitive manual inputs from individual planners, ultimately saving valuable time and improving store replenishment success.
Value Delivery
Key Functionalities Implemented
The o9 Enterprise Knowledge Graph is leveraged to optimize Assortment Planning using a standardized process which connects and aligns the global and local planners. With o9, planners now have the ability to analyze historical data, build assortment strategies, manage store clusters, build store level assortments and perform box level (facings-driven) planning that supports pre-season and in-season planning.
Systems Replaced
Excel.
Customer Benefits
Success Factors — 3 reasons why o9 was selected
- Intuitive UI — easy to adopt by the planners.
- Flexible platform which can accommodate specific needs/customizations.
- Optimizing store assortment to drive top line growth.
KPI Impacted
- A decrease in the time spent by the planners in building the store assortments.
- An increase in sales and reduction of inventory (obsolescence).
- Ensuring the right product mix at stores.

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