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At aim10x Europe, o9’s largest EMEA event, held in Amsterdam on June 4, three consumer goods companies presented planning transformations built on o9, and all three made a similar point: the technology is only one part of the work. Leaders from Philip Morris International, Coty, and Group SEB spent most of their sessions discussing what surrounds the platform, including the business outcomes a transformation is anchored to, the processes it redesigns, the operating model it depends on, the data it connects, and the changes in how people work day to day.
Taken together, the three talks cover different stages and dimensions of the same journey. PMI focused on how to structure a transformation at the outset by starting from business outcomes rather than technology. Coty focused on what happens after a rollout is complete, and why a live system marks the start of value realization rather than the end of the project. Group SEB focused on how a global demand planning transformation can build collective efficiency by connecting functions, data, and markets around one shared planning platform.
PMI: Structuring a Transformation Around Business Outcomes
Ankur Gupta, Director Operations Strategy – AI & Digital at Philip Morris International, opened by setting expectations. "This is not a technology conversation," he said. "Transformation doesn't happen based on technology." PMI is in the middle of a significant business shift, with its smoke-free portfolio now representing 41 to 42 percent of its total business and its product range expanding. Rather than framing the work as a technology program, the company chose to organize it around business results.
A "Right to Left" Approach to Setting Targets
PMI describes its approach as "right to left." Where many transformations begin with technology and aim for business value later, PMI started by defining the outcomes it wanted. The company set specific targets up front, covering both financial and in-process KPIs. Ankur framed the level of ambition directly: "Unless those numbers look scary, the numbers are not worth it." Among the targets: compressing IBP cycles from five weeks to one across the company, reducing waste, write-offs, and air freight against defined numerical goals, and getting an organization spanning more than 180 markets to "operate in one way, with one explainable number that we are all going to go with."
Redesigning the Planning Process
Ankur was clear that targets matter only if they change how work is done, across processes, people, technology, and data together. PMI's process scope connects revenue growth management, demand, IBP, and supply through to tier-one, tier-two, and tier-three suppliers. The company is also reframing IBP itself, moving from "a consensus-based discussion among many teams" toward "a focused conversation about how we close the gap" between a bottom-up forecast and the financial target. Sequential manual handoffs, which run from market to central team to supply to manufacturing to material planning, are being replaced with a more automated system. As Ankur described it, "humans will only make exception decisions."
The Role of the Operating Model
Ankur placed particular emphasis on the operating model, which he argued is often where transformations lose momentum. "Unless we truly change the operating model, the roles, the organization structure, the ways of working, and the performance management of all those people, what they are measured on, none of this will ever land." One change he highlighted was separating the commercial forecast from the financial target, so that general managers are not incentivized to adjust the forecast to meet their numbers. "If the focus is the forecast, the focus will be wrong."
In PMI's view, the result of getting these elements right is what Ankur called decision intelligence. "We can't buy decision intelligence," he said. "It emerges once we have the first four boxes taken care of," referring to outcomes, process, operating model, and data and technology, in that order.
PMI: Early Results in the Electronics Category
Bhagawan Rakesh Rajangam, Director IT – Supply Chain at Philip Morris International, presented results from the company's electronics category. PMI has implemented supply planning on o9 for this category, connecting demand across more than 100 markets to roughly ten electronic manufacturing suppliers (EMS) and around fifty tier-two suppliers in a single network. This includes a co-innovation with o9 on materials management for components PMI does not own directly.
Scenario Planning During a Supplier Disruption
Rakesh described how the network supports decision-making during disruptions. When a material constraint arises at an EMS or tier-two supplier, the system can rebalance materials across the network. When a cyberattack affected one of PMI's EMS partners, scenario planning in o9 helped the team respond. "We were able to quickly shift the capacity to other EMSs and still meet our demand," he said. The platform also supports can-make optimization, which can convert at-risk inventory into sellable finished goods, and can push decisions to suppliers, automating the creation, postponement, or cancellation of purchase orders once they are accepted.
Reported Improvements in Decision Time and Visibility
Rakesh reported that analysis and decision time on changes has fallen by roughly 45 percent, and that inventory visibility across tier one and tier two, which previously relied on emails and phone calls, is now available "at the click of a button." He also noted a forward-looking step: hosting o9 within PMI's own network and connecting it to existing data, which is intended to support extending the model from the electronics category to other categories over time.
Three Closing Recommendations
Ankur closed with three recommendations:
- First, define the business outcomes before naming the technology.
- Second, redesign processes for an environment in which AI plays a larger role, recognizing that the eventual shape of those processes is not yet fully known.
- Third, give sustained attention to the operating model and how work is done day to day.
Coty: Moving From Project Delivery to Value Realization
Ewan Forsyth, Senior Director Global Planning Transformation at Coty, focused on the phase that follows a rollout. Coty completed a global rollout of demand planning, S&OP, and the innovation module, moving "from 0 percent of business forecasting in o9 to 100 percent in just under 10 months." The project consolidated six legacy systems into one and established a centralized demand hub in Barcelona. Coty has now moved, as Ewan put it, "from full-on project mode to full-on value realization mode."
His central point aligned with PMI's. "Technology alone does not realize the full value potential," he said. He organized Coty's experience around four elements: technology, speed, data science, and adoption. He spent the least time on technology, leaving the detail to "the o9 experts," and focused on the other three.
Speed: The Case for a Fast Rollout
Coty chose a fast rollout to move out of project mode quickly, and Ewan acknowledged the trade-offs. At one point, three phases overlapped, with hypercare, parallel run, and S&OP UAT running simultaneously. Despite the strain, his assessment was that the speed was worthwhile: "I would take that pain any day to get out of project execution mode faster and into value realization mode." In hindsight, he said he would add more contingency planning around a tight schedule, so that a delay of a month or two would be easier to absorb.
Data Science: Managing Imperfect Forecasts at Go-Live
Ewan was candid that a newly live system is not immediately perfect. "When you switch on o9, not everything is perfect," he said. One Coty business, cosmetics, already produces a strong, low-bias system forecast suitable for moving toward low-touch planning. Another division's accuracy is lower and continues to be improved. His practical recommendation was to carry some additional safety stock through the transition period to account for forecasts that still need refinement.
Adoption: Knowing When to Leave the Forecast Alone
Ewan described adoption as the most difficult of the four elements, and offered a specific observation about forecast adjustments. Analyzing four months of data in the strong-forecast division, Coty found that "80 percent of the touches at EAN level are adding zero value," which one planner described as "shifting peanuts around." The response was less about imposing a rule and more about building trust, demonstrating to planners that the system forecast was reliable so they could "focus on the 20 percent that is genuine value-add."
The centralized demand team Coty stood up in Barcelona, established in parallel with the software implementation, added complexity to an already demanding rollout, but it is proving to be one of the most important parts of the success Coty has achieved, and something Ewan said he would do again if replaying the transformation. Rather than leaving forecasts exposed to the day-to-day pressures of the business, the central team acts as an unbiased check, actively correcting forecasts to hold zero bias "from any sales director, marketing director, or GM." That independence is the value-add: it protects the integrity of the demand signal from the commercial pressures that would otherwise distort it, and it does so consistently across markets while the underlying data science continues to mature. In the stronger-forecast division the discipline is knowing when to leave the forecast alone; in the others, the centralized team's discipline is knowing when and how to correct it. Both are deliberate, and both depend on the same principle of trusting the data and removing bias from the signal.
Partnership and the Limits of Technology Alone
Ewan closed on two points that, taken together, capture the balance at the heart of Coty's transformation. The first: "Technology alone does not deliver value." The decisions made by users and leaders are what ultimately move the demand signal. But the reverse is equally true, and implicit throughout his session: those decisions and disciplines are only possible when the right software is in place beneath them. The ability to trust a system forecast and stop touching it, to measure that 80 percent of overrides add no value, and to hold zero bias across markets all depend on a platform capable of producing a reliable, transparent, measurable demand signal in the first place. The judgment and the technology reinforce each other; neither delivers value without the other.
That interdependence led to his second point: "One company alone doesn't deliver success." Value emerges from a shared objective between Coty and o9, with the platform providing the foundation and the partnership turning it into realized outcomes.
Group SEB: Building a demand planning transformation around collective efficiency
Sébastien Mauriange, VP Group Demand and S&OP at Group SEB, presented the company’s BOND planning project with o9, a global demand planning transformation designed to help the business manage the complexity of forecasting everyday products sold around the world.
Group SEB operates in more than 150 countries, sells more than 400 million products a year, and manages roughly 50,000 consumer goods SKUs across about 200 product families. That scale, combined with a broad brand portfolio spanning global names such as Tefal, Rowenta, Krups, and Moulinex, as well as strong regional and premium brands, makes demand planning a critical capability for the group.
Sébastien placed BOND within a broader group-level supply chain initiative, built around customer excellence, productivity and operational excellence, the supply chain of the future, and leadership and capabilities. The BOND project sits within the supply chain of the future pillar, with demand planning as the first step and an end-to-end supply chain vision to follow.
Why BOND is more than a supply chain project
Sébastien was clear that BOND is not only a supply chain or demand planning project. The name reflects the intent to create a bridge across departments: sales, marketing, controlling, supply chain, and top management all working around one solution. The project is also about connecting data that previously sat in different places, including internal data, sell-out data, retail stock, market share, and market trends. Through o9, Group SEB aims to bring those inputs into one collaborative platform and create a single point of truth for demand planning.
That shift changes the role of planning. While entering and sharing information had been a manual process until now, o9 has made it possible to consolidate the financial forecast, marketing forecast, key account forecast, and consensus forecast into a single tool. The goal is to move discussions away from feelings and toward data, scenarios, and action. As Sébastien put it, demand planning should become “the voice of the supply chain in the company,” with planners shaping the plan rather than simply consolidating inputs from other functions.
Moving from manual planning to touchless planning
Automation is a central theme for Group SEB, which is making rapid progress in this area; o9 enables automated planning and machine learning. The teams first learned how to use the tool and then had to agree to let it take over in automatic mode. That means trusting the system forecast where it performs well, touching the forecast less, and focusing planners’ time on root-cause analysis, exceptions, and action plans.
Group SEB is also using a business-led center of expertise to support that change. Rather than making the center of expertise purely technical, the company selected business-side people who can manage dashboards locally, understand the system forecast, identify what should become touchless, and investigate where the system is not yet working as expected. Their role is to help markets improve performance while building adoption and confidence in the new way of working.
A fast global rollout
The pace of deployment and its acceptance by the various markets were key to the implementation of this new tool. BOND enabled Group SEB to achieve this goal in less than two years, with the first technical rollout taking place just eight months after the project began, followed by a new market deployment every three weeks.
The objective is to complete the full demand planning rollout by the end of 2026.
Early results and adoption signals
Sébastien reported several early results that show both delivery discipline and growing adoption across the business:
- Delivered on time and on budget: Group SEB is delivering the BOND rollout against its original commitments, which Sébastien described as basic but essential for a transformation of this scale.
- No business disruption: The rollout has maintained business continuity, an important proof point given the speed of deployment and the number of markets involved.
- o9 is becoming the single point of truth: The platform is now widely recognized inside Group SEB as the central demand planning tool, with teams increasingly using it as the shared reference point.
- The system forecast is already creating momentum: On one-third of the business, the system forecast is performing better than the manual forecast.
- A clear case for touchless planning is emerging: Where the system forecast is outperforming manual planning, Group SEB can begin shifting planner behavior toward fewer touches and more focus on exceptions, root-cause analysis, and action plans.
What made the rollout work
Starting with one pilot market, Group SEB used that experience to identify key success factors. One was visible commitment from the general management of each market, ensuring the project was treated as a business priority and given the right resources. Another was internal communication, so teams understood the benefits, timing, and direction of the transformation.
Group SEB also deliberately placed key users not only in supply chain but also in sales and marketing, reinforcing that BOND is meant to break silos rather than automate one function in isolation. Testing, feedback loops, strong documentation, and even a chatbot were added to support adoption and make the system easier for new users to learn.
The next step: from demand planning to end-to-end planning
Sébastien closed by emphasizing that demand planning is only the first pillar of Group SEB’s transformation journey. The company is already investigating more scenarios to gain greater automation and efficiency. Group SEB’s message was that the value of a planning platform depends on the work around it: the data it connects, the processes it changes, the teams it empowers, and the trust it builds in new ways of planning.
The Shared Lesson
Read together, the PMI, Coty, and Group SEB sessions cover different parts of the same arc and reach a consistent conclusion about where value comes from. PMI’s emphasis is on the work done before and during implementation: defining clear business outcomes, redesigning processes, and aligning the operating model so that roles, incentives, and decision rights change alongside the system. Coty’s emphasis is on the work after go-live: moving out of project mode efficiently, being realistic about data quality during the transition, and helping planners apply judgment where it adds value. Group SEB adds a third perspective: how a global demand planning transformation can create collective efficiency by connecting functions, markets, and data around one shared planning process.
All three companies built their transformations on o9, and all three treated the platform as one component of a broader effort. As Ankur put it, decision intelligence is not something an organization can simply purchase; it develops when outcomes, process, people, and data are addressed in the right sequence. Coty showed that value realization depends on what happens after the system goes live: adoption, trust in the forecast, and the discipline to intervene only where judgment adds value. Group SEB showed that trust also has to be built across functions, with planners moving from manual consolidation toward exception management, root-cause analysis, and action.
The system is necessary, but what these sessions illustrated is the range of work around it that determines whether it delivers: the outcomes it serves, the processes it changes, the data it connects, the operating model it supports, and the confidence it builds in new ways of planning.
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