Innovative Footwear Company Enhances Planning and Inventory Management with IoT

The customer is a world leader in the production of innovative casual footwear for men, women, and children. The company offers a broad portfolio of all-season products, while remaining true to its core molded footwear heritage. The company operates in a variety of global marketplaces and has a complex supply chain. It aims to deliver personalized products quickly across various distribution channels while maintaining high margins and managing inventory effectively.

The customer, a global leader in innovative casual footwear, faced significant challenges in connecting top-down and bottom-up planning, managing inventory while maintaining high margins, and delivering personalized products quickly across various distribution channels. The company struggled with holistic planning, finding it difficult to link top-down planning to sales and inventory planning within a monthly cycle. Additionally, the company faced issues with forecast accuracy due to high demand volatility, short product life cycles, and a variety of global marketplaces. The long lead times and complex supply chain made supply/demand matching a resource-intensive, manual effort.

The company adopted o9’s Enterprise Knowledge Graph to address these challenges. This solution enabled the company to connect the dots for holistic planning, ensuring alignment in the execution of the plan, and making decisions based on real-time insights when corrections were necessary. To improve forecast accuracy, the company implemented attribute-based planning, increased efficiency in the usage of resources, and leveraged ML analytics for demand-shaping capabilities. This increased its ability to quickly react to changes in demand and marketplaces. For demand/supply matching, the company used o9 to respond to demand with visible supply pipelines, effective utilization of available capacity, and scenario modeling to quickly evaluate multiple options to solve shortages. The o9 Enterprise Knowledge Graph was used for AI-powered demand planning to improve accuracy and reduce bias. Intelligent supply planning provided an immediate response to demand scenarios, using o9’s advanced solvers and inventory capabilities to bring down working capital and optimize service levels.

• The implementation of o9’s Enterprise Knowledge Graph brought about significant operational improvements for the company. The solution enabled holistic planning, linking top-down planning to sales and inventory planning within a monthly cycle. This resulted in more efficient planning processes and better alignment in the execution of plans. The company also saw improvements in forecast accuracy, with the ability to quickly react to changes in demand and marketplaces. The solution also simplified the complex task of demand/supply matching, making it less resource-intensive and more efficient. The company was able to respond to demand with visible supply pipelines and effective utilization of available capacity. The AI-powered demand planning and intelligent supply planning capabilities of the solution helped to optimize service levels and reduce working capital.

• Increase in inventory turns
• Increase in resource efficiency
• Reduction of lost sales due to stock-outs