A multi-brand beauty retailer operating over 600 stores across the Americas.

Merchandise Financial Planning

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

Opportunity

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 cross channels with increased visibility and collaboration

Currency Planning

The company’s margin planning is a critical link to their global financial performance, and currently, they cannot plan and review margin components and impacts.

Opportunity

With the o9 Digital Brain users can now plan in local currency based on their scope of responsibilities. Additionally, they can convert any of their actual or plan measures between currencies with the click of a single button.

Planning in Silos

The marketing, sales, finance and supply chain functions were operating in relative silos, having their own assumptions and versions of the truth.

Opportunity

With o9 as their differentiated collaborative platform for Integrated Business Planning, The company is able to drive more fact-based decision-making, enabling faster execution and better accountability.

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.

Systems Replaced

Just-Enough/Mi9 (now ToolsGroup).

Success Factors — 3 reasons why o9 was selected

1. 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
2. The ability to bring the various functions (sales, marketing, finance, supply chain) together enabled better and faster decision-making.
3. 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

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