Owens & Minor, the nation’s leading distributor of medical and surgical supplies to the acute-care market, sought to improve its demand forecasting and replenishment processes. The company aimed to enhance its ability to meet changes in customer demand on time and profitably, while further reducing its capital investments. The company had been using a homegrown purchase order system which was obsolete and had no ability to optimize the actual order. The company also faced challenges in building truckloads and was limited in adding more truckload vendors. The company was running well over its service level goal in aggregate and wanted to meet its service level goal with less inventory.

NII Holdings, a wireless communication leader in Latin America, was facing critical challenges in forecast accuracy, inventory right-sizing, and product obsolescence. The company's planning tool was a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that was prone to errors and time-consuming manual data entry. The company needed to upgrade its forecasting and replenishment solutions and processes to improve efficiency and accuracy. NII operates hundreds of stores under several different retail banners and layouts, from free-standing buildings to mall kiosks. Because its business is based on high-tech products with innovative features, some of the company’s most critical challenges lie in the areas of forecast accuracy, inventory right-sizing and product obsolescence.

Kenco, a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, was facing challenges with one of its healthcare customers who was using outdated warehouse management technology with legacy functionality. The customer needed more control, system-directed productivity gains, and the value-added functionality offered by a best-in-class warehouse management solution. The existing technology solution lacked emergency replenishment functionality, which was interfering with their ability to fill orders rapidly and cost-effectively. The legacy solution could not allocate orders to the pick faces without the full quantity available to fill the order, requiring the last few items of a particular lot to be physically moved out of the pick face so the system would generate a replenishment for a new lot to fill orders.

Avnet, Inc., one of the world’s largest distributors of electronic components, computer products and embedded technology, was facing challenges in leveraging the full potential of Blue Yonder’s forecasting solution. Although the company had been using the solution for several years, it was not utilizing all of its features, leaving potential benefits unrealized. Avnet planners were still doing certain forecasts manually that could be handled automatically by the Blue Yonder solution. Furthermore, Avnet was not capitalizing on opportunities to provide value-added services for customers and to increase revenue.

Staples Canada, the country's largest office products company, was seeking a way to operate their offices more efficiently and affordably. They offer a wide range of office supplies, technology, electronics, and office furniture, as well as business services such as computer repair and maintenance, and copy and print services. With over 15,000 associates at more than 330 stores and at its head office in Richmond Hill, Ontario, the company needed a robust solution to manage their extensive inventory and ensure seamless operations. The challenge was to find a solution that could quickly and seamlessly resolve support issues and processes.

Super Retail Group, a leading leisure retailer in Australia, faced significant supply chain complexity due to its rapid growth through strategic acquisitions. By 2011, the company was managing seven distinct supply chains, spanning from sourcing in Asia to distribution in Australia and New Zealand. The vast geography of Australia added another layer of difficulty, making cost optimization per unit and movement critical. Additionally, the company started adding more soft goods, which have different demand patterns than hard goods. The retailer needed a forecasting and replenishment solution that could handle its geographic difficulty, as well as the stock-keeping unit (SKU) complexity and demand variation across its seven retail brands. To overcome these challenges, Super Retail Group committed to investing more than $50 million in supply chain and inventory management improvements over three years.

Walgreens, the nation's largest drugstore chain with fiscal 2014 sales of $76 billion, serves millions of customers every day. In order to help these shoppers easily find the health, wellness and beauty products they're looking for, Walgreens launched a consumer-centric retailing program back in 2009 to provide localized offerings in its new and remodeled store formats. However, the company faced challenges in managing the vast array of products and ensuring that the right products were available at the right locations. The company needed a solution that could improve planning accuracy and efficiency across the organization.

Tilly's, a leading specialty retailer of West Coast inspired apparel, footwear, and accessories, was looking to leverage JDA Support Services to enable the consistently high performance of JDA Merchandise Management System (MMS) and JDA Allocation. The company wanted to submit and resolve issues quickly via phone or website, ensure uninterrupted performance of planning and allocation processes, access self-service JDA resources — including webinars and KnowledgeBase — to stay current on JDA solutions, and improve knowledge of solution features for better results.

Talbots, a leading multi-channel retailer, was looking to optimize its merchandise assortment across its 540 stores. The retailer was using a 20-year-old system that was not providing the necessary insights and capabilities to meet customers' needs. The legacy system was manually intensive and had limitations that prevented users from allocating packs and loose product together, as well as viewing sales trends. The company needed a new technology that would enable more accurate and meaningful allocations. The goal was to replace the legacy system with advanced allocation technology that optimizes each store’s potential by placing the right merchandise in the right location at the right time.

RONA, the largest Canadian distributor and retailer of hardware, home renovation and gardening products, faced challenges in managing its inventory across its vast distribution network. The company had thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs) and millions of SKU locations in more than 17 distribution centers (DCs), making inventory management a complex task. The process to generate a demand forecast to support inventory management was disjointed, with little automation and many hand-offs. RONA needed to understand more precisely where inventory was needed across its entire distribution network. The company was only looking backward and needed to look ahead and act on the future.

Praxis, one of the largest do-it-yourself (DIY) chain stores in the Netherlands, was facing a daily challenge of employee planning. They needed to find a balance between efficiency, effectiveness, and customer service. With proper planning, they could improve customer service and prevent excess capacity as well as undesirably high workloads. Acknowledging this, Praxis started searching for an advanced planning solution that would ensure getting the right person at the right time in the right place. After extensive market research, Praxis selected JDA Workforce Management, from JDA’s Store Operations solution. This system met Praxis’ functional requirements best. Praxis was also enthusiastic about the user interface and the short implementation time.

Mark’s Work Wearhouse, a retail chain that sells work clothes, boots, business wear, casual wear, and outdoor apparel, faced a challenge in managing its inventory. The company's product complexity and geographic coverage increased over the years, creating merchandising challenges. The company recognized a gap between what and how much they were placing in their stores and what customers actually wanted. For out-of-stock products in specific stores, Mark’s had a customer promise that was expensive to fulfill. The company had a service — Mark’s FastFind — where they would deliver merchandise that’s out-of-stock in a certain size or color to the shopper’s home or local store at no cost to the consumer. However, this commitment was depleting the company's margin due to the vast distances involved in transporting goods across Canada.

Gruppo PAM, one of Italy’s leading grocery chains, was facing a challenge of maintaining a large product range and outstanding service while still achieving the operational efficiencies necessary to keep prices low. The company needed to buy inventory in the right quantity to maximize its margins while minimizing its financial exposure. The company realized it needed advanced technology capabilities to automate its forecasting and replenishment processes. The challenge was to find a solution that could help them optimize forecasting and replenishment at its distribution centers while rationalizing and minimizing product inventory.

Giant Eagle, Inc., one of the nation’s largest food retailers and distributors, faced a major challenge in properly scheduling, tracking, and paying its employees to deliver services, receive shipments, stock shelves, set up promotions, and perform other tasks involved in running the stores. Prior to 2007, scheduling was mostly manual, resulting in overstaffing, understaffing, and excessive overtime costs. The company had older time and attendance and time clock systems that required a lot of manual intervention. Payroll errors resulted from inaccurate information and punch errors. Compliance with labor laws was always a concern due to the large number of minors employed in the stores.

Bon Preu, a retail company, was faced with the challenge of managing 14,000 items across all of its stores. Ensuring high levels of product availability and service with such vast product diversity was a daunting task. The company aimed to optimize the performance and profitability of its stores, warehouses, and transportation network, while ensuring that their stores stayed stocked. The goals were to improve store revenues via increased product availability, reduce inventory levels in warehouses, increase profitability through strategic pricing, and enhance overall efficiency and productivity across the supply chain.

Big W, a division of Woolworths Limited, operates 181 stores across Australia, generating approximately AU$4.4 billion in sales annually. Over the past few years, the retailer has experienced significant growth, making it more challenging to ensure that its seasonal merchandise was being delivered to the right store, in the right quantities, at the right time. Big W recognized that it needed to replace its 20-year-old allocation system, used to push 50 percent of its merchandise to its stores, with more sophisticated and advanced technology. Big W sought a solution that would enable its planning assistants to allocate multiple product lines at once, while ensuring that it was delivering an ideal product mix to its stores as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to improve stock availability, reduce markdowns and increase sales.

B&Q, a major retail brand under Kingfisher plc, operates 359 stores in the UK and Ireland, offering more than 40,000 products. To support its retail program, B&Q needed to transform its logistics function, replacing its manual, mainly paper-based legacy systems, which were no longer suitable for a business that serves more than 150 million customers a year. This required a flexible warehouse management solution (WMS) to provide real-time information. B&Q wanted to ensure a seamless transition of IT functionality across a network that had been established for 15 years, and needed a solution that would provide it with the ability to manage more than 100,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) across its sites, integrate stock supplied by approximately 600 different vendors, improve inventory accuracy with real-time information and clear visibility of orders, manage cross-dock and flow through platforms, and consolidate and pick stock for each store, which is dispatched daily via 500 trailer loads carrying around 45 pallets of products.

As the second-largest grocery retailer in Sweden, Axfood operates 250 stores under the Willys and Hemköp brands and collaborates with approximately 820 proprietor-run stores. The company faced the challenge of managing space planning across more than 1,000 stores to ensure consistently high revenues and margins. The company's space planning team had to manage a large volume of planogram work, with each planner managing 200 to 300 planograms that needed to be updated three times a year. The level of collaboration between Axfood and its proprietor-owned stores varied greatly, making it crucial to support consistently high-performing displays and plans across all stores.

Ace Hardware Corporation, the world’s largest retailer-owned hardware cooperative, has been on a journey of global supply chain transformation. The company's needs became more complex as it expanded globally. Ace had been relying on two different replenishment solutions: JDA to support its domestic vendors and a third-party solution to handle its import vendors that weren’t integrated with the business. The company needed a solution that could support time-phased demand forecasting along with multi-echelon and multi-tier planning capabilities for its domestic and import vendors.

Tyco, the world’s largest fire protection and security company, was facing challenges with its distribution and logistics processes which were previously outsourced. The outsourced warehouse management solution was very manual and inefficient. In order to improve service levels and reduce costs, Tyco decided to automate and standardize its distribution and fulfillment environments. The company needed a robust warehouse management solution that could provide a standardized, high-velocity distribution model. The solution had to interface with seven different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, driving consistency across the warehouse floor.

Teva UK Limited, a major supplier of pharmaceutical products to the UK health service, needed to optimize its supply chain to handle the growing complexity and scale of its business. The company adheres to stringent quality procedures to safeguard the integrity of its stock, tracking products both by EAN number and batch number. Stock must be kept in temperature-controlled conditions and in an environment that meets the highest standards of cleanliness. Due to the growing complexity and scale of its business, Teva decided to build a new logistics center that would support its increasing volume and provide new ways to service its customers. The company sought a warehouse management solution, with advanced features such as automated storage and retrieval, pick by light, a powered conveyor and a paperless operation, that would enable it to increase efficiencies, save costs and improve service in the new facility.

TE Connectivity (TE) needed to improve the sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes in each of its business units. The challenge was that every division was approaching this from a different perspective, and many, if not all, were simultaneously managing organizational, process or IT issues. While TE’s global IT organization supported all of the company’s business units, the company did not have a common S&OP platform or tool set, and business units were replicating information across multiple tools. TE needed an S&OP solution with the scalability to handle multiple business units and the ability to support flexible corporate hierarchies and various product coding, customer and other structures. Integration with current enterprise resource planning and other systems, as well as robust exception management capabilities, were also key requirements.

Sunny Delight Beverages Co., a leading producer of juice-based drinks in North America, was faced with the challenge of transitioning their JDA Warehouse Management production server to a new location. This transition was time-sensitive and needed to be completed within a 63-hour window. The company needed to partner with JDA to support the production server transition and consult with JDA experts before the transition to create a solid foundation of the support process. The company also needed to rely on the JDA Support Services team for troubleshooting and speedy resolution.

The 1995 merger of Scotts and MiracleGro to create The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company marked a major historical milestone for the company. However, for several years following the merger, the combined company operated with multiple customer invoices, multiple sales forces calling on the same customers, multiple supply chain designs, and multiple technology platforms. These factors resulted in low productivity and hampered customer service, making effective execution of the company’s primary selling season extremely difficult. ScottsMiracle-Gro realized it needed to evolve in order to address these post-merger challenges. In the period from 2000 to 2005, the company launched its “One Face to the Customer” initiative and invested $250 million in additional capacity and other capital programs as well as $100 million in technology system upgrades to support this forward-looking direction.

Sanitarium, the largest health food company in Australia, has been advocating the benefits of wholesome plant-based foods since 1898. Over the years, the company has seen a fundamental change in its business due to advances in technology. Sanitarium has partnered with JDA to adopt end-to-end supply chain solutions that include JDA Supply Chain Planner and Inventory Planner, to drive production, deployment, and capacity planning. These solutions have enabled high customer service levels and continued reduction in total stock holding. However, as the markets grew, Sanitarium saw an ongoing need to deliver profitable, high customer service levels to new and existing customer segments. Distribution space and working capital were also a constant challenge with the continuous need to reduce stock holding. The company embarked on a strategy to implement an order promising and allocation management system, using JDA Order Promiser, with the objective to ensure accurate promise dates and quantity, reserve supply for key accounts while minimising order shortage, and reschedule open orders based on the latest supply picture from JDA Supply Chain Planner.

Renault, a European automotive company, has built a reputation for quality, innovation, and service. A critical part of this equation is the automaker’s spare parts business. They pledge to deliver any one of 200,000 spare parts overnight through a multi-echelon distribution network. Renault maintained multiple layers of redundant safety stock in order to meet its overnight delivery promise even though its own supplier lead times range from two to eight weeks. Renault wanted to reduce inventory levels to free up cashflow without degrading its spare parts delivery commitment. Renault’s spare parts operations are supported by two master warehouses and a network of dozens of distribution centers scattered across Europe. Historically, Renault was able to honor its customer overnight delivery commitment by maintaining high spare parts inventory levels across its complex European distribution network, which includes up to five tiers of suppliers, dealers and regional distribution centers. This required stocking large amounts of redundant safety stock since supplier lead times vary from two to eight weeks. This was costly.

Positec, a China-based manufacturer and marketer of home improvement tools, was facing several challenges in managing its global supply chain. Despite its industry-leading growth and presence in 12 countries, the company's internal tools for managing the supply chain were not up to the mark. Positec lacked an aggregate forecasting tool and intelligent fulfillment capabilities to optimize inventory levels and profitably deploy products. The company had a long replenishment planning cycle that delayed its response times significantly. It also had no real basis for planning at the regional distribution center level and low visibility across its entire global supply chain.

Partner Communications, a leading cellular operator in Israel, is known for delivering superior customer service in a crowded market. The company has built a reputation for product and service innovation, being the first cellular provider to introduce 4G services in Israel. Speed of delivery is essential to their business in order to provide the best service quality to their customers. To support its commitment to providing outstanding customer service and product availability, Partner turned to Blue Yonder in an effort to improve service levels, increase productivity and reduce costs by automating product forecasting and distribution planning.

Oriflame, one of the largest direct sales companies in the world, was facing challenges in managing its fast-growing business. The company's annual revenue has increased rapidly over the past 20 years, placing pressure on its global production and distribution network. Oriflame also replaces or relaunches around 800 of its 2,000 products annually, making it especially difficult to forecast demand for these new stock-keeping units. Additionally, Oriflame publishes a new catalog every three weeks, with specific offers that are valid only for that three-week period. When a catalog expires demand can dip significantly, making forecasting and fulfillment more challenging. With that level of fluctuation in demand, the company wanted to determine exactly how much product to have on hand to ensure it wasn’t left with excess inventory.

Medifast, a rapidly growing company, was facing challenges in scaling its ERP system to accommodate the increasing volume in each of its distribution centers. The company's goals were to decrease labor costs in the shipping function, save in annual shipping costs, and reduce unloading time for trucks by optimizing their distribution center operations. Prior to implementing a new solution, Medifast employees were hand-selecting boxes, measuring efficiency based on speed, and required two employees to scan, weigh, and apply shipping labels. This process was inefficient and led to excessive use of void fill and delays from repacking.