This customer has grown extensively over the years. It has a scattered IT landscape with fifteen different ERPs and business complexity of different channels (retail, wholesale, e-commerce). They required end-to-end planning capabilities which was provided by o9.
o9 Digital Brain for Tobacco
A large manufacturer of cigars and traditional pipe tobacco. Owns about 200 leading brands.
Sustainability Impact
Reduction of product waste and inventory.
Business Scope Challenges
Omnichannel Complexity
All different go-to-market channels have their own supply chain configuration and complexities. The customer applied a one size fits all stat forecasting model, leading to forecast accuracy issues.
Opportunity
With o9, the company was able to segment go-to-market channels and demand and incorporate internal and external drivers of demand and key market trends into o9’s highly differentiated ML forecasting models, limiting excess inventory and stock-out occurrences.
E2E Visibility
They lacked visibility across all nodes on their supply chain. As a consequence, the company was running the supply chain mostly unconstrained. This showed the need for more sophisticated supply planning capabilities.
Opportunity
With o9, there is now the unique capability
of a digital twin for all 30,000 SKUs. This
digital twin allows for performing constraint supply planning and is able to model all constraints (lead times, manufacturing capacities, shelf-life, regulatory constraints etc.) and costs.
Scenario Planning
The company ran its entire operations based on an inaccurate forecast and an unconstrained supply plan without the ability to run business scenarios and translate that into financial consequences.
Opportunity
With o9, the company not only gets a better forecast and a constraint supply plan, but also advanced scenario planning capabilities
to understand the implications of different demand and supply scenarios.
Value Delivery
Key Functionalities Implemented
The o9 Enterprise Knowledge Graph is used to move towards driver-based forecasting, supply planning across time horizons, inventory optimization, control tower and IBP. These capabilities allow to respond faster to changes in the market and reduce the total cost to serve.
Systems Replaced
Forecast Pro, Excel and homegrown solutions.
Customer Benefits
Success Factors — 3 reasons why o9 was selected
- o9’s approach to data integration and seamless integration with 15 different ERPs. o9 also offers an innovative approach to use transactional data to use master data.
- o9’s analytics capability and the use of ML and AI to improve planning processes like forecasting.
- Configurability: speed-to-value to implement and integrate 3 distinct planning workflows in 16 months across 15+ ERPs.
KPI Impacted
- Faster response to market opportunities.
- Reduction of lost sales.
- Reduction of cost through better capacity utilization and planning.
