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Softlines

Beyond Spreadsheets: How a 600-Store Beauty Retailer Unified Global Merchandise Planning

Trapped by legacy tools and disparate Excel files, this multi-brand personal care retailer struggled to align central and local teams. Discover how they replaced inefficient manual inputs with o9’s Digital Brain—streamlining merchandise financial planning (MFP), improving gross margin visibility, and enabling real-time scenario planning across the Americas.

The company was unable to collaboratively plan between central and local teams and conduct real-time scenario planning. o9 will provide them with a reliable and scalable technology to support the future strategic growth of the company.

Sustainability impact

Reduction in product waste and inventory.

challenges

Complexity to Clarity

Challenge

The company’s current MFP ecosystem is a combination of a legacy planning tool, data exports, and disparate Excel spreadsheets, creating inefficiency throughout the planning process

Solution

With the o9’s Digital Brain, it is now able to streamline and automate the collaboration between different teams and remove repetitive manual inputs from individual planners. o9 will provide the ability to plan sales and gross margin by type and manage gross margin across channels with increased visibility and collaboration

Value Delivery

Systems Replaced

  • Just-Enough/Mi9 (now ToolsGroup)

Key Functionalities Implemented

The company will use the o9 Enterprise Knowledge Graph to run Strategic Planning, Pre-Season Planning, and In-Season OTB, one single integrated collaborative platform, bringing one single source of truth. Additionally, o9 converted a key Excel-based margin analytical solution into the platform.

Customer Benefits

success factors

  • o9’s highly differentiated and future-proof Enterprise Knowledge Graph, not just solving today’s problems, but having a vision for a single retail planning solution for the future
  • The ability to bring the various functions (sales, marketing, finance, supply chain) together enabled better and faster decision-making.
  • o9’s current MFP customers spoke to o9’s ability to deploy a best-in-class retail planning solution as well as industry-leading technology.

KPI Impacted

  • Better and faster decision-making resulted in increased productivity
  • Faster response to risks and opportunities resulted in an improvement of top-line sales and a reduction of inventories.
  • Seamless multi-currency and multi-calendar support for geographic regions and linking back to the parent company.

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