Blue Yonder
Overview
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HQ Location
United States
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Year Founded
1985
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Company Type
Private
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Revenue
$1-10b
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Employees
1,001 - 10,000
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Website
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Twitter Handle
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Company Description
Blue Yonder is the world leader in Digital Supply Chain and omni-channel commerce fulfillment. Its intelligent, end-to-end platform enables retailers, manufacturers and logistics providers to seamlessly predict, pivot and fulfill customer demand. With Blue Yonder, you can make more automated, profitable business decisions that deliver greater growth and re-imagined customer experiences.
IoT Snapshot
Blue Yonder is a provider of Industrial IoT platform as a service (paas), and analytics and modeling technologies, and also active in the finance and insurance, and retail industries.
Technologies
Use Cases
Functional Areas
Industries
Technology Stack
Blue Yonder’s Technology Stack maps Blue Yonder’s participation in the platform as a service (paas), and analytics and modeling IoT Technology stack.
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Devices Layer
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Edge Layer
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Cloud Layer
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Application Layer
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Supporting Technologies
Technological Capability:
None
Minor
Moderate
Strong
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Case Studies.
Case Study
CNH Industrial's Customer-Centric Aftermarket Supply Chain Transformation with Blue Yonder
CNH Industrial, a global leader in capital goods, was on a digital transformation journey with a focus on improving their customer experience. The company was seeking innovative solutions to optimize their spare parts management business across the 12 brands within the group. The challenge was to find a solution that could support the end-to-end supply chain, monitor changing customer needs, and align the supply chain with those needs in real-time. CNH Industrial needed a powerful processing, SaaS-based solution that could provide real-time visibility and collaboration across their supply chain, enhance collaboration across dealers and stakeholders in multi-tier networks, and maximize parts availability to minimize machine downtime and total cost of ownership (TCO).
Case Study
Advance Auto Parts Turns to JDA to Increase Product Availability — Leading to Both Revenue and Service Gains
Advance Auto Parts, a leading automotive aftermarket retailer, was facing a shift in its retail segment from do-it-yourself consumers to do-it-for-me commercial customers. This shift placed added pressure on Advance to ensure immediate product availability. The company was already using JDA Software’s solutions for space and category management, as well as replenishment, to manage its nationwide supply chain when it decided to embark on a supply chain transformation project. In 2010, Advance made a strategic decision to expand the role of these solutions, add physical supply chain infrastructure, and incorporate new technology solutions and business processes to optimize its warehouse, workforce, execution and performance management. To increase service and availability over a large geographic area, Advance decided to retrofit its existing distribution centers (DCs), while also constructing a new 550,000 square-foot facility that would provide daily replenishments to stores in a targeted rollout region.
Case Study
Ace Hardware Transforms Its Supply Chain and Reduces Replenishment and Safety-Stock Inventory by $27 Million
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.
Case Study
Constellation Brands Takes a Spirited Approach to Category Management
Constellation Brands, a leading producer, marketer, and manufacturer of beer, wine, and spirits, faced a challenge in maximizing its category item impact on shelf due to the expansion of brands and SKUs offered in stores. The company was relying on historical data in a fast-paced market, which was not sufficient to keep up with the rapidly changing demand. The company needed a solution that could incorporate forward-looking data and predictive analytics into its space plans to support growth and maximize the value of assortment over the longer term.
Case Study
Morrisons Puts the Customer at the Heart of Every Decision
UK-based supermarket chain Morrisons wanted to increase on-shelf availability through improved demand planning and replenishment based on analysis of customer behavior at every store. The goal is to put the customer at the heart of every decision. Store replenishment based on manual ordering by in-store teams proved time consuming, created inconsistencies between stores and was not always accurate. Morrisons wanted any new planning solution to easily integrate with, and streamline, its complex IT infrastructure, as well as be capital light.
Case Study
McKesson Canada Optimizes Demand and Supply Planning
McKesson Canada, a company with annual revenues in the billions, serves millions of customers every day, delivering more than one-third of all prescription drugs in Canada. The company’s global supply chain manages over 250,000 distinct product SKUs. McKesson Canada was challenged to optimize its inbound products, and the inventory in its 13 distribution centers (DCs), via an outdated legacy system. New technology was needed to meet growing customer requirements, support revenue gains, manage supply-side disruptions, and increase accuracy and efficiency. McKesson Canada partnered with Blue Yonder to manage product flow into its DCs, as well as inventory levels. The stakes are high: billions of dollars in product acquisitions and over $1 billion of inventory are managed through Blue Yonder.
Case Study
Innovation on Tap at Coca-Cola Bottling
Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated (CCBCC) was facing challenges in managing dynamic sales volumes, maintaining customer service levels, and providing better visibility into demand drivers across different shapes, sizes, and flavors of refreshment in real time. The company was also struggling with the complexity of dealing with more suppliers and their specific packaging constraints. The need for a higher degree of micro-marketing at the channel and chain-store level further complicated matters as each side fits into different package categories.
Case Study
Successful Demand Forecasting at dm
dm, a large retail company, faced several challenges in its operations. The company needed to improve the cooperation between the manufacturer and the distribution center to ensure product availability. It also needed to provide valid predictions for industry partners. The company was dealing with the issue of short-term demand for goods in stores versus long delivery times of industry partners. It needed to make precise sales forecasts, even for exceptional cases like holidays or vacations. The company also wanted to avoid over- and understaffing in its stores.
Case Study
Mahindra & Mahindra Drives Profitability via Dynamic Segmentation
Mahindra & Mahindra Farm Equipment, part of the $20 billion Mahindra Group, is the world’s number-one tractor company by volume. Its automotive business competes in almost every segment of the industry. The Spares Business Unit (SBU) provides genuine vehicle and tractor spare parts via advanced capabilities in sourcing, assembling, warehousing and distribution. To maximize supply chain efficiencies and service, Mahindra & Mahindra constantly evaluates scientific methods to tweak demand forecasting, inventory management and replenishment planning strategies to ensure that the right parts are available at the right place and time. However, their traditional, manually driven segmentation processes and tools often resulted in inefficient allocation, high safety inventory levels and less-than-optimal service levels.
Case Study
JFE Steel Forges Real-time Planning
JFE Steel Group, a leading steel manufacturer based in Tokyo, was facing challenges in optimizing efficiency, capacity, and costs at its manufacturing facilities due to a lack of accurate sales forecast and intelligent planning software. The sales data was stored on individual sales person’s computers, making it difficult for management to collect and load the information into their planning spreadsheets. This resulted in a slow, labor-intensive process where changes to the monthly plan had to be entered manually and the long-term plan was never updated for changes. The company was in need of a solution that could provide immediate visibility to demand, including changes impacting both monthly and long-term planning.
Case Study
Blue Yonder is the Remedy for a Healthier Supply Chain
Merck Serono International S.A., a global pharmaceutical and biotechnology leader, faced the challenge of integrating two very different supply chains for traditional pharmaceuticals and biotechnology-based pharmaceuticals. The traditional pharmaceutical supply chain was locally driven with a pull concept, while the biotechnology supply chain was centrally managed with a push concept. During the integration, the company also had to ensure high customer-service levels that aligned with its 'no stock-out' philosophy. Additionally, Merck Serono wanted to constrain distribution with planned production orders, taking into account capacity constraints and the availability of the products' main components. To optimize business practices, the company needed improved forecasting accuracy and manufacturing planning support to drive efficiency and limit inventories to increase cash flow.
Case Study
Robinsons Supermarkets Keeps Customers at the Heart of Their Business
Robinsons Supermarket, a subsidiary of Robinsons Retail Holdings Inc. (RRHI), is the second largest multi-channel retailer in the Philippines. As the business grew, venturing into new regions and adding new segments and sub-formats, their manual processes and legacy systems became too inefficient and limiting. Expansion into new regions and formats created a need to segment their customer base for customized and engaging shelf assortments. The supermarket had to ensure that the products that meet the needs of their customers are always available on shelf. An efficient and equipped supply chain process was needed to address the persistent challenge of on-shelf stock availability.
Case Study
Supply Chain Makeover
Avon, the world’s leading direct seller of beauty and related products, markets to women in 143 countries through 4.8 million independent sales representatives. Avon’s products are sold with widely varying product offerings in different countries and through multiple channels including direct, Internet, catalog and outlets. Consolidation and globalization of both competitors and customers and the rapid growth of developing markets has also increased the complexity of the business. As a result, this highly promotions-driven market produces fluctuations in product demand and a complex supply chain. Although Avon’s operations expanded considerably in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in recent years, there was no single central planning function that was responsible for demand, inventory, and supply planning. Production planning at Avon’s three factories — in Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom — was highly manual, inflexible, unresponsive to customers’ requirements and could not support Avon’s planned growth into new markets.
Case Study
Sweet Success
The Hershey Company, a global leader in chocolate and confectionery, operates a complex and global supply chain. With eight U.S.-based manufacturing facilities, five finished-goods distribution centers, and over 100,000 outbound refrigerated truckloads per year, the company faced the challenge of reducing transportation costs while dealing with increased fuel charges. The company's supply chain had to handle more than two billion pounds in annual throughput in the U.S. and Canada, and its products were sold in more than 90 countries around the world. As part of Project Greenlight, an overall transportation initiative launched in 2007, Hershey decided to invest in transportation-related process and technology improvements that would deliver a high return on investment.
Case Study
Caterpillar Logistics, Inc. Relies on JDA Education Services
Caterpillar Logistics, a leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives, sought to improve its existing processes, produce knowledgeable and effective users, strengthen customer relationships, and establish customized, in-house training based on industry best practices. The company has robust experience in many logistics processes, including inbound logistics, after-sales service support, finished goods distribution and reverse logistics. However, it needed a solution that could help it optimize these processes and increase customer satisfaction.
Case Study
Improving Workforce Productivity and Retention at Associated Food Stores
Associated Food Stores (AFS) is a cooperatively owned wholesale distributor that operates 43 corporate supermarkets and supports over 400 independently owned supermarket locations across eight states. The company was facing challenges with its warehouse labor scheduling, which was based on static schedules from week to week regardless of daily demand changes. This resulted in wasted labor. Additionally, AFS’s warehouse operates in an area with highly competitive demand for labor. A lack of flexibility in scheduling was causing higher than desired turnover which increased hiring and training costs. The previous solution AFS used for labor scheduling and time and attendance was not integrated, causing a lack of cohesion in managing the workforce.
Case Study
Replenishment and Price Optimization at OTTO
OTTO, a German multichannel retailer, faced challenges in its competitive environment characterized by low margins, high competitive pressure, and rapidly changing market conditions and customer demands. The company needed to balance product availability and pricing for every single article in its extensive product portfolio. One of the greatest challenges was predicting the sales of an article at an early stage, as the profitable purchase of goods determines overall success. OTTO also faced challenges in reducing delivery times for partner products, which were longer than for OTTO’s own brands due to more complicated logistics processes. The retailer needed to know which articles would sell, how frequently, and in what sizes and amounts to order the right articles in advance based on the forecasts and expedite delivery to the customer.
Case Study
Improving Factory Planning at BIC
BIC, a world leader in stationary, lighters, and shaver products, was facing challenges with its manual sequencing process at its Charlotte packaging facility. The process could only look out three days, limiting their ability to take advantage of improved production planning. The three-day rolling schedule resulted in frequent, expensive, and time-consuming changeovers. Moreover, the Charlotte facility was nearing capacity and would require capital investment in a new facility if production throughput could not be increased.
Case Study
Amway’s Global Supply Chain Runs on Blue Yonder
Amway, a global company selling health, beauty, and home care products in over 100 countries, was facing inconsistencies in its supply chain and logistics processes as it expanded into new regions. The company's annual sales exceed $8 billion, and managing the supply chain for such a vast operation was becoming increasingly complex. The company had a long-standing partnership with Blue Yonder, which had helped unify the global supply chain and deliver more consistent results. However, Amway was looking to further improve its operations by migrating its Blue Yonder solutions to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. This move was aimed at maximizing speed, capacity, and agility, while minimizing Amway’s total cost of ownership.
Case Study
PVH Masters End-to-End Planning for Global Retail Brands
PVH, a U.S.-based retailer with a diversified portfolio of brands including CALVIN KLEIN, Tommy Hilfiger, Van Heusen, and IZOD, aimed to enable end-to-end global planning across multiple brands. As one of the largest global apparel companies reporting $8.2 billion in 2016 revenues, visibility of products from creation through the end consumer’s purchase was crucial. The company needed to ensure they were using their data properly, sending out the right demand, and contracting correctly with their factories without overcapacity.
Case Study
Growing Logistics Results at Bayer Crop Science
Bayer Crop Science, a company with annual revenues exceeding $23 billion US, delivers agricultural products in more than 70 countries. The company operates more than 350 facilities and was challenged to adopt consistent technology solutions, analytical tools, and best practices across all these locations. Logistics managers at Bayer needed standardized decision-making practices and shared values that would enable them to act in the best financial interests of the company. The challenge was to implement a single logistics platform with shared data, metrics, workflows, and best practices across all locations, supporting the company’s goal for global standardization.
Case Study
Recipe for Success
Butterball, a leading producer of turkey products, faced significant supply chain challenges due to the seasonal and promotion-driven nature of many of its products, as well as the fact that every product is date-sensitive. The company needed to forecast at a very high level of accuracy, as well as improve its date-sensitive inventory management. Meeting retailers’ different service-level expectations and product freshness requirements added a layer of planning complexity to Butterball’s supply chain that if not managed well could lead to a risk of obsolescent inventory and unhappy customers.
Case Study
Infinite Possibilities with Infineon
Infineon Technologies operates in the semiconductor and system solutions industry, which is known for its demand volatility, long product lead times, and high capital investments. The company serves a diverse range of customers worldwide, including auto manufacturers, industrial electronics companies, chip card and security businesses, and information and communications technology leaders. The challenge for Infineon was to create a single integrated, multidimensional sales and operations planning process that promotes global collaboration and enables the company to quickly respond to market changes. The company’s ability to sense and respond to demand changes, while balancing global production capacity across its more than 20 facilities, was proving to be a significant challenge.
Case Study
Oxford University Press’s Award-winning Distribution
Oxford University Press (OUP), founded in 1478, publishes around 7,000 new titles every year, in a variety of formats and up to 40 languages. As the largest university press in the world, it has annual sales of 110 million units. OUP operates its own distribution centre, making it one of the few publishers worldwide to not rely on a third-party distributor. From its warehouse in Kettering, the organization dispatches 36,000 orders every month, 70 percent of which are destined for addresses outside of the U.K. To keep up with growth, OUP sought a scalable warehouse control system to replace their outdated technology which severely restricted how the organization operated and made it reliant on a conveyoring system that was complex and costly to maintain.
Case Study
Rapid Results via the Cloud
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.
Case Study
Building Supply Chain Visibility
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.
Case Study
Cultivating Success
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.
Case Study
ITC Limited Creates the Perfect Recipe for Supply Chain Success
ITC Limited, a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate based in India, was facing challenges in managing its supply chain for its fast-growing packaged foods business, particularly biscuits. The biscuit segment was experiencing high demand volatility and materials cost fluctuations. ITC's existing spreadsheet-based tools were not accounting for its continuously changing cost structures, making it difficult for the company to see the macro effects of the supply chain decisions they were making. The frequent manufacturing changeovers required to produce its more than 120 distinct biscuit SKUs across its network of 17 factories and the dramatic price fluctuations in the agricultural sector that affect their materials costs added to the complexity of cost optimization. Furthermore, ITC’s spreadsheet-based planning did not allow them to make effective medium and long-range strategic plans.
Case Study
Optimizing Logistics Services
UTi Worldwide, a global business based on air and ocean freight forwarding, was facing a challenge. Its customers were demanding more than just the operational business offering. They wanted enhanced supply chain management services that would optimize their supply chains. UTi's existing IT systems were not equipped for this task as they were primarily geared towards processing orders and not optimizing logistics flows. The company needed a new IT solution that could provide a range of new logistics services, evaluate different distribution solutions, simulate alternative distribution networks, and optimize supply chains.
Case Study
Keeping Pets Healthy & Happy at PetSmart
PetSmart, Inc., the largest specialty pet retailer in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada, faced a significant challenge in keeping the best assortments of products stocked and effectively displayed on store shelves to meet evolving customer needs. This challenge was particularly acute given the company's extensive network of more than 1,600 stores and a thriving online business. PetSmart's customer needs continue to evolve, making family-friendly localized assortments and space planning difficult to maintain across its stores. Furthermore, the company previously lacked visibility to customer demand across its stores and online operations, making strategic planning difficult. A continued focus on efficiency was also critical for offering competitively priced products and services.
Case Study
At AEON, It’s Customer First
AEON CO. (M) BHD., a leading multiple-format retailer in Malaysia, was facing challenges in improving store assortments based on localized schematic plans, eliminating out-of-stocks, and maintaining efficient assortment listings to increase customer satisfaction. Speed-to-market was critical in having the right products allocated to the right stores with appropriate volumes to increase sales and minimize out-of-stocks. AEON stressed the importance of cloud-based solutions to reduce implementation time and quickly realize return on investment.
Case Study
Driving Innovation
Kimberly-Clark, a global leader in the consumer products industry, was seeking ways to improve its transportation management process with the aim of reducing overall freight costs, improving service, and gaining efficiency. The company challenged its business support groups, including transportation, to drive additional savings across the organization. The transportation executives at Kimberly-Clark considered a number of software vendors to solve these challenges before ultimately choosing JDA Software’s Intelligent Fulfillment™ solutions. The company was looking for a solution that could provide the best optimization capabilities to drive the type of freight savings needed in the transportation organization at Kimberly-Clark.
Case Study
Keeping it Fresh at Ariztía
Ariztía, the second largest chicken and poultry producer in Chile, was facing challenges in managing its short shelf life products. The company's products, which are shipped either fresh or frozen to customers, required tight inventory control to assure freshness. This was of paramount importance to Ariztía as it directly impacted their mission to provide quality products and excellent service to their customers. The company also strongly believed in the value of training and education to improve employee productivity. However, assuring freshness mandated strict adherence to first expired/first out inventory turnover practices, which was proving to be a challenge.
Case Study
Innovations in Workforce Management at Harris Teeter
Harris Teeter, a North Carolina-based subsidiary of The Kroger Co., operates over 265 retail locations, 52 fuel centers, three distribution centers, and a dairy manufacturing operation. The company needed an enterprise-wide workforce management platform to drive associate engagement, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. The solution had to reflect and support the culture of diversity and inclusion that is a foundation of their business model. Harris Teeter wanted a workforce management solution that not only supported their continued push for innovation and inclusion but also brought innovative capabilities to the table. The company continuously strives to innovate in the way they serve their customers, which includes having Starbucks locations in stores, offering “Hot Bars” serving pizza by the slice and other chef-prepared foods, omelet stations, sushi stations, burger bars, and beer and wine bars. Their stores also support buy online/pickup in-store (BOPUS) convenience for shoppers.
Case Study
Building a Platform for Transportation Optimization at Anheuser-Busch
Anheuser-Busch, a company with over 160 years of history, owns and operates more than 120 facilities, including breweries, wholesaler distribution centers, agricultural facilities and packaging plants, employing more than 19,000 people. The company was facing a challenge in strategically orchestrating transportation needs across its production plants, warehouses and verticals such as metal container manufacturing facilities. The company was struggling to manage transportation demand and delivery across this complex network using an outdated technology solution. The need for a unified platform for always-on transportation optimization was evident. The company required a digital chain, from order creation to delivery, to gain greater control over transportation spending and to have real-time visibility and orchestration across the network.
Case Study
Supported by Blue Yonder, Traxion Leads in Speed and Service
Traxion, Mexico's largest logistics provider, has experienced a 28-fold growth since its inception in 2011. With a fleet of 8,000 vehicles and over 1,000 customers, Traxion is three times the size of its nearest competitor. As Traxion's customer base grows, so do customer requirements. The company needs to maximize its speed and responsiveness, while also controlling costs and ensuring profitability. The Mexican third-party logistics market was growing up to 25% per year before 2020. The pandemic dramatically accelerated that growth, with e-commerce in Mexico doubling in 2020, compressing three years of logistics demand into just one year.
Case Study
PepsiCo Latin America Achieves Over 80% Forecast Accuracy, Driving Greater Precision
PepsiCo Latin America, a long-time Blue Yonder customer, was seeking a customer-focused and perfectly synchronized value chain, supported by standardized usage of its supply planning and execution solutions across 16 countries. As demand variability, materials costs and transportation expenses increased, this value chain would enable greater speed, accuracy and responsiveness. The company was looking for a solution that could integrate and roll out its solutions in demand planning, supply planning, inventory optimization, shipment scheduling and promotions across 34 countries.
Case Study
Lenovo Benefits From JDA Short-Term Consulting
Lenovo, a $34 billion personal technology company, was seeking to increase the reporting accuracy and efficiency of the sales-order planned ship date functionality within JDA Factory Planner. The company wanted to automate manual processes to enhance productivity and needed on-site assistance to support their information technology (IT) department in solving key issues. Lenovo operates in more than 160 countries and is dedicated to exceptionally engineered PCs and mobile Internet devices. The company's business is built on product innovation, a highly efficient global supply chain, and strong strategic execution.
Case Study
Engineered for Global Success
Lenovo, a global personal technology company, experienced a dramatic expansion of its global presence when it acquired IBM’s personal computing (PC) division in 2005. This acquisition set the stage for rapid organic growth, with the company's revenue increasing from US$13 billion in 2006 to US$21 billion in 2011. However, Lenovo faced a significant challenge in supporting its e-commerce initiatives for its global customer base, which spans six continents. The company's site availability was approximately 89 percent, meaning for every 100 hours, there were 11 hours in which it was unable to transact. This led to lost sales, customer satisfaction issues, and brand issues. Additionally, Lenovo needed a system that could handle unpredictable loads and scale dramatically based on seasonal events.
Case Study
Refreshing Its Supply Chain Operations
Swire Beverages, the franchise bottler for all brands of The Coca-Cola Company in Hong Kong, was facing significant supply chain challenges due to the rapid growth of the Coca-Cola brand in China. The company's network of bottling production facilities was under pressure due to the use of a manual system that was reaching its breaking point. Swire needed a solution to manage the forecasted growth of its 10 bottling plants in Central, Eastern and Southern China, as well as the increasing complexity of its products and supply chain. The company was also faced with more demanding customer service levels, and its Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) center was tapped to provide planning support for a new supply chain joint venture to service all of China’s bottlers, of which Swire is a significant shareholder. The difficulty in accurate forecasting was compounded by the seasonality of the beverage industry, consumer marketing initiatives and the complexity of Swire Beverages’ nationwide network.
Case Study
On a Winning Streak
Hibbett Sports, a sporting goods retailer, has grown from a single store in Birmingham, Alabama, to more than 890 stores across the U.S. The company sells sports equipment and apparel from brand leaders such as Nike, Under Armour, adidas, The North Face, and Oakley, as well as fan apparel for college and professional teams that is specific to its local markets. With an average store size of approximately 5,000 square feet, it is critical for the retailer to target its merchandise very carefully to ensure that consumers in every market will find exactly what they’re looking for. To support this localized market strategy, Hibbett Sports has relied on JDA Software’s Retail Planning solution since 2006. As the company expanded into new regions, it realized there were some new challenges it needed to address. The company wanted to gain a better understanding of its regional selling seasons, as well as the differences in merchandise seasonality, in order to move products in and out of the stores quicker.
Case Study
Driving Supply Chain Excellence at Mitsubishi
Mitsubishi Motors North America, Inc. (MMNA) was facing challenges in achieving a high level of supply chain excellence. The company was focusing on three key performance indicators (KPIs) - customer service levels, on-hand inventory objectives, and forecast accuracy targets. However, MMNA’s old forecast module had only one algorithm that was applied to all parts, regardless of whether they were fast-moving or slow-moving parts. This approach was not effective in achieving their KPIs. The company found it difficult to perform analytics on their inventory business. They needed a forecasting tool that was flexible and could support the rigors and stock-keeping unit volumes of an automotive original equipment manufacturer.
Case Study
Delivering Excellence
Federated Co-operatives Limited (FCL) is a unique business model based on partnership and collaboration. The organization is owned by approximately 235 retail members across Western Canada who sell a wide variety of products, from petroleum to home and building supplies as well as groceries, including fresh produce. FCL provides central wholesaling, manufacturing and administrative services to these locally owned retail co-operatives, creating volume and price efficiencies. FCL’s complex supply chain includes four regional distribution centers, a fleet of nearly 400 trailers and tankers, a petroleum refinery, six plants that produce animal feed, and 10 propane distribution branches. As operations research director, Richard Krause is charged with managing the in-bound supply chain at FCL. “We support the end-to-end solutions for ordering, replenishment, maintaining our inventories in our distribution centers, and having product available for our stores’ needs,” Krause explained. “We’re a very unique company in that we’re owned by our stores. That makes customer service a special priority.”
Case Study
Kenco Helps Healthcare Provide Better Outcomes
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.
Case Study
Staples Canada Turns to JDA Support Services to Maximize Solution Performance
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.
Case Study
JDA Support Services Minimizes Downtime — and Maximizes Solution Performance — at Tilly’s
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.
Case Study
Tailoring an Allocation Strategy
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.
Case Study
A Perfect Fit
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.
Case Study
Good Price and Great Service with Bon Preu
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.
Case Study
Securing Cost and Service Gains
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.
Case Study
Driving Responsiveness
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.
Case Study
Positec’s Toolkit for Success
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.
Case Study
Enhancing Labor Productivity
Briggs & Stratton, the world’s largest producer of air-cooled gasoline engines for outdoor power equipment, was facing a challenge in its warehouse labor management. The company's replacement parts division ships aftermarket and service parts worldwide from two facilities. It handles between 70,000 to 75,000 SKUs representing $40 million to $45 million in inventory. Prior to 2003, the Menomonee Falls Distribution Center (MFDC) had no standardized way for associates to do their jobs or to measure productivity. The MFDC management team felt they could get greater productivity if they standardized work methods, set goals and measured results. To help research this hypothesis the University of Wisconsin Supply Chain Consortium conducted a study that suggested there was significant opportunity for return on investment if the MFDC deployed labor management technology.
Case Study
Growing Global Lifestyle Brands
PVH Corp. is a U.S.-based apparel company and one of the largest global apparel companies, with $8.2 billion in 2016 revenues coming from a diversified portfolio of brands, including CALVIN KLEIN, Tommy Hilfiger, Van Heusen, and IZOD. The company has a strong presence in wholesale, and many retail locations around the globe. For PVH, being able to see products from creation through the end consumer’s purchase is key. However, they lacked end-to-end visibility to their entire supply chain, which hindered their ability to align demand, fulfillment, and capacity planning. This lack of visibility made it difficult for everyone along the supply chain to make good decisions. PVH needed a solution that would enable end-to-end global planning across multiple brands.
Case Study
Standardizing Processes and Increasing Speed of Deployment
Silk Contract Logistics, a specialist in wharf cartage, warehousing, distribution, and supply chain services in all major Australian cities, was looking to replace their legacy Warehouse Management System (WMS) with a tier-1 solution. The company aimed to standardize their operational processes, improve customer satisfaction levels, and grow their business. They wanted a solution that would allow them to take on more implementations simultaneously and reduce deployment time. Silk also wanted to make the process of moving to a new service provider as smooth as possible for their customers, especially during the onboarding process. The company recognized the need to move away from a customer bespoke solution and focus on standardizing their offering.
Case Study
DHL Supply Chain Delivers Warehouse Robotics Excellence
DHL Supply Chain, a leading third-party logistics company, is on a mission to establish its technology leadership through its Accelerated Digitalization Initiative. A key goal of this initiative is to incorporate automation and robotics at more than 2000 sites globally. However, orchestrating this implementation from a global perspective posed a significant challenge. The company needed a solution that could seamlessly integrate a range of robotics with its existing warehouse management system (WMS).
Case Study
JBS Swift & Company
JBS Swift & Company, the world's largest beef producer, was facing a challenge with its warehouse management system. The company operates in multiple countries and had three US-based warehouses running different systems. This lack of a common platform was causing inefficiencies, communication issues, and a lack of visibility. The company was already using JDA at one of its warehouses and, after extensive research and consultation with industry analysts, decided to upgrade the JDA solution at its Grand Island, Nebraska site and implement it at the other two facilities. The company chose JDA because the technology was a good match for their needs and the system provided flexibility for process change. JBS Swift & Company has complex supply chain needs, with each warehouse acting as an extension of the manufacturing facility. The company needed to track and manage inventory from receipt in the processing plant, throughout processing, into the warehouse and on to its final retail destination. The company also had to meet additional safety and traceability requirements due to its operation in the food industry.
Case Study
FleetPride Drives Heavy-duty Returns on Slow Movers
FleetPride, the largest independent distributor of aftermarket heavy-duty truck and trailer parts in the United States, was facing a significant challenge with its inventory management. Approximately 70% of their inventory, which includes a wide variety of items from small nuts and washers to transmissions and axles, sells less than one unit per month. This resulted in a high level of excess and obsolete (E&O) inventory, particularly at the local branch level. Traditional forecasting methods were not effective for these slow-moving items, as they often represented forecasts as a fraction, creating a misleading picture of demand. FleetPride was using work-arounds to support their slow mover business needs because purpose-built slow mover solutions were not previously available.
Case Study
Airtight Operations
Airgas, Inc., the largest distributor of industrial, medical and specialty gases and welding equipment and supplies in the United States, faced unique supply chain challenges due to its large business network. The company had set ambitious goals for growth and profitability, implementing an aggressive business strategy driven by organic growth and numerous core, product line and strategic acquisitions. However, the company’s rapid, acquisition-fueled growth was not supported by its existing systems. Airgas used a mixture of legacy systems and industry-specific solutions to manage demand, but these systems were not integrated and could not scale to keep up with the company’s growth. Each of the company’s 12 regional operating companies ran its own version of a demand management solution, further complicating the need to manage almost 3.5 million items in a complex wholesale distribution environment. As a result, Airgas lacked the enterprise-wide view of supply and demand needed to optimize inventory, reduce costs and drive customer satisfaction.
Case Study
Supporting Rapid Growth at El Palacio de Hierro
El Palacio de Hierro, a Mexico City-based upscale department store chain, was facing a period of rapid growth, with predictions of a 521 percent increase. Their existing warehouse management system (WMS) was outdated and frequently experienced downtime, which was impacting their service to customers and stores. The company was supporting deliveries of omni-channel orders to customers and its over 200 stores from a 430,000 sq. ft. distribution center (DC) in Mexico City. The outdated WMS, servers, and database resulted in capacity and response time issues, as well as frequent downtime. With the predicted rapid growth and goals for improved customer service, including delivery of everything from e-commerce orders to major appliances, El Palacio de Hierro needed a new WMS to support all DC functions efficiently with 100% product availability and 99%+ order accuracy.
Case Study
Best-of-Breed 3PL Capabilities for Healthcare
Owens & Minor, a leading distributor of medical and surgical supplies, launched OM HealthCare Logistics (OM HCL) to enhance its leadership position in healthcare supply chain management. OM HCL is a full-service, third-party logistics (3PL) and business process outsourcing business unit providing end-to-end supply chain solutions for the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. To establish a best-of-breed 3PL capable of addressing healthcare manufacturers’ toughest supply chain challenges, they needed a technology partner that offered best-in-class productivity solutions. As a healthcare-focused 3PL, OM HCL would be supporting a diverse client base within healthcare with varying and unique requirements. These varying requirements created a demand for an infrastructure that was more adaptive and more flexible to meet various clients’ needs beyond the capabilities of the current operating system supporting the Owens & Minor core business units.
Case Study
Brewing Success
Ambev, a leading South American brewer and PepsiCo International, Inc.’s bottler outside of the U.S., experienced a significant spike in order volume across its operating regions. This led to the company's decision to search for better transportation solutions that could handle increasingly complex demands from the company’s growing business. In addition to cost and efficiency concerns, Ambev also needed to ensure that customer service levels kept pace with increasing demand. Therefore, the company sought to improve asset utilization and processes while also positioning itself for continued future growth.
Case Study
Working Wonders With Workforce Management
HEMA, a leading European retailer with approximately 650 stores across the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, was facing challenges in managing its workforce of over 10,000 employees. The company recognized that effective human resources management was critical to its success. HEMA wanted to implement a new workforce management system to optimize labor costs, ensure high customer service levels, and address all operations that characterize a multi-category retail business across all store formats. Another goal was to encourage collaboration and best-practice sharing among employees in different regions. The company conducted a rigorous process to identify the right technology solution, evaluating 12 vendors before making a selection.
Case Study
Luminate™ Retail Bolsters Sales and Margins for Ernsting’s family
Ernsting’s family, one of the largest cross-channel retailers, was facing challenges in maintaining consistent sales levels across their varying product ranges. The German-based company was also dealing with the tremendous upheaval in the marketplace due to the rise of online stores and digitization. Classic seasonal cycles gave way to faster trends and short-lived monthly collections, forcing new stock arrivals every two days. With more than 1,800 stores across Germany and Austria, the company needed a more strategic way to optimize pricing and promotions to quickly sell new collections within specified timeframes while increasing margins.
Case Study
Tallink Keeps Pricing and Revenue Ship Shape
Tallink Grupp, a leading provider of premium mini-cruise and passenger transport services in the Baltic Sea region, was facing a challenge with its growing customer demand and business expansion. The company's largest revenue stream was on-board purchases, making it crucial to consider ancillary revenues in addition to ticket revenues when making pricing policies and revenue decisions. The company was also dealing with an abundance of last-minute online travel bookings, which made it difficult to make effective pricing decisions. Tallink felt that automation of pricing decisions would free them to focus on new trends that could boost revenue.
Case Study
From Category Management to Leadership at Pepsico
PepsiCo Australia & New Zealand, home to globally recognized brands such as Smith’s Chips, Red Rock Deli, Bluebird Chips and Twisties, sought to evolve from category management to category leadership. The company aimed to establish a total macro-snacking view, given the increasing importance of grocery. PepsiCo also wanted to improve its rankings in retail benchmarking surveys as a measure of its performance. The company aimed to better engage with retailers to create a macro-snacking total impulse solution and drive store-of-the-future concepts in order to increase basket value.
Case Study
SELGROS Saves Distribution Costs for Advertising Materials
SELGROS, a wholesale company, was facing a challenge with its advertising strategy. Every two weeks, the company would mail up to one million brochures to its customers. The decision on which customer should receive a catalog was a manual process using segmentation and decision trees. This process was not only time-consuming but also inefficient as it did not consider all the elements that influence customer spending. As a result, the company acknowledged that its marketing budget was not being used efficiently. SELGROS sought a solution to automate the process, reduce advertising costs, and improve customer targeting.
Case Study
Campbell Bakes Up a 20% Reduction in Planogram Generation Time
Campbell’s Snacks team advises on a robust bakery product line, with 750 distinct items sold under 100 brands. The advisor team must routinely produce and update more than 4,500 planograms to cover this complex product line, especially as marketing strategies and demand patterns shift. Historically, it took up to 10 weeks to create these planograms manually, and there was frequent employee overtime. The challenge was to find a solution that could automate and accelerate the process of producing thousands of customized space plans.
Case Study
Creating a Flexible Supply Chain at Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, was facing challenges with its resource-intensive spreadsheet-based planning process. The process involved four-week planning cycles with only basic planning assumptions. The company wanted a daily integrated supply chain plan that includes demand, material supply and capacity constraints and utilization, allocation and execution objectives. They also wanted visibility into demand and supply across the entire organization, including the inventory in each segment and channel, promotion plans and supply and production plans. Furthermore, they wanted to use customer segmentation and a multilayered postponement strategy to reduce overall inventory levels while better positioning products and materials to support improved customer service.
Case Study
Rexall’s Prescription for Success
Rexall, a Canadian retail pharmaceutical company, was facing challenges due to its reliance on older technology and processes. The store replenishment process was initiated at the store level based on the results of daily physical inventory counts that leveraged handheld RF technology. Store managers had limited visibility to future store-level demand pattern changes, item cannibalization, safety stock requirements or days coverage prior to placing these manual orders. This resulted in frequent demand-supply imbalances. Additionally, purchase orders to vendors were conducted via non-EDI channels with patterns and volatility that resembled the patterns within the stores, causing similar imbalances with the DCs. As such, the organization sought to establish an advanced planning model that would eliminate the extremely labor intensive and manual replenishment process.
Case Study
Bayer’s Digital Logistics Transformation
Bayer, formerly Monsanto, identified the need to standardize its end-to-end transportation processes globally, which previously followed different practices across operating regions. The company's logistics processes required responsiveness to meet time-sensitive customer demands, a pressure that was intensified by the company’s continuing growth in its global markets. The critical need for standardization paired with seasonality challenges, road transportation challenges and lacking adequate tools and processes to provide visibility into logistics raised awareness around the need for a complete digital logistics overhaul. Bayer’s goal was to improve the customer experience that could consistently provide better information to their customers, while staying efficient.
Case Study
Mahindra & Mahindra Increases Revenues by 10% via Inventory Optimization
Mahindra & Mahindra Farm Equipment, part of the $20 billion Mahindra Group, is the world’s number-one tractor company by volume. Its Spares Business Unit (SBU) provides genuine vehicle and tractor spare parts via advanced capabilities in sourcing, assembling, warehousing and distribution. However, the SBU was losing sales revenues due to stockouts and tight working capital as a result of its high inventory investments. The business was relying on manual analysis and Excel spreadsheets to create demand and supply plans, but they were not adequate for the complexity and scale of the challenge. To gain greater responsiveness and ensure the availability of spares for different demand patterns, Mahindra sought Blue Yonder’s expertise and advanced technologies to optimize its parts inventories, spanning 100,000 SKUs and 21 distribution centers.
Case Study
Marks & Spencer Maximizes Agility via Cloud-Based Planning
Marks & Spencer, a leading multinational retailer based in London, has been relying on Blue Yonder’s demand and fulfillment solutions, as well as workforce management, to optimize processes, manage complexity, and support responsiveness. However, the company needed to migrate all its Blue Yonder solutions to the cloud to achieve higher levels of agility and increased supply chain speed to provide the best service for customers. The challenge was to minimize business disruptions during the cloud migration as Blue Yonder demand and fulfillment is one of their mission-critical applications, which generates orders for their downstream systems. The company could not afford for their stores not to be replenished each day.
Case Study
Alnatura Grows Revenues via Optimal Product Placement
Alnatura, an organic supermarket chain operating 139 supermarkets across Germany, faced a challenge in managing its tight space constraints while maximizing product availability and minimizing stock-outs. This was particularly difficult due to the diverse local preferences across its markets and the high costs associated with waste in fresh foods. The company needed to drive more automation, greater accuracy and localization, and increased efficiency for its category management and space planning activities.
Case Study
Supermercados Peruanos Achieves Accurate, Low-Touch Daily Forecasting
Supermercados Peruanos, the largest supermarket chain in Peru, was struggling to accurately forecast demand for fresh and ultra-fresh foods such as produce and meat. The retailer was using a manual and decentralized process, relying on Excel spreadsheets and manual processes to forecast ultra-fresh products, based on history. This approach was revealed to be problematic during the pandemic, as it was unable to manage uncertainty and go beyond human cognition. The company needed an advanced, automated tool that could manage uncertainty and go beyond human cognition. They have millions of dollars invested at their distribution centers and needed to protect those investments with precision, not with averages.
Case Study
TNT Quenches Its Thirst for Warehouse Efficiency
ThaiNamthip (TNT), Coca-Cola’s bottling partner in Thailand, was facing challenges in optimizing its warehouse operations. The company aimed to increase the productivity of both human workers and physical assets while minimizing errors. TNT's goal was to replace time-consuming, paper-based manual processes with speed and automation. As part of a long-term effort to digitalize its entire supply chain, TNT sought a solution that could help it maintain its market leadership position in the carbonated beverages market. The company recognized that continued investment in new technologies was crucial for its long-term success.
Case Study
Henkel’s Global Warehouse Network Runs on Blue Yonder
Henkel, a German multinational company and a leader in both the consumer goods and industrial sectors, operates hundreds of distribution facilities of all sizes around the world. These facilities were relying on time-consuming, error-prone manual processes and a variety of outdated technology solutions. To improve customer service while driving down costs, Henkel needed to adopt best practices, advanced digital capabilities and process standardization across its worldwide network. The company was looking for a solution that could provide improved process speed, accuracy, and efficiency, higher service at a reasonable cost, and increased visibility and control.
Case Study
Microsoft Cloud Supply Chain Partners with Blue Yonder to Maximize Service and Reliability
Microsoft manages more than 200 data centers in 34 countries, and it’s adding 50 to 100 new data centers every year. The global supply chain also includes traditional functions such as manufacturing and transportation, provided by third parties. Across this geographically distributed network, Microsoft needs to ensure uninterrupted, high-quality, reliable service. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the weaknesses in the world’s supply chains, as well as the need for a rapid, coordinated response when the unexpected happens.
Case Study
Mass Appeal
Massdiscounters, one of the largest value retailers in South Africa, is expanding its presence in sub-Saharan Africa, including Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Mozambique. As part of its aggressive corporate growth strategy, Massdiscounters recognized the need to re-evaluate its best-of-breed technology strategy. The company has recently added food to its merchandise array, leading to increased market share but also adding to the complexity of Massdiscounters’ supply chain model. To support this move, Massdiscounters has invested heavily in new physical infrastructure, including three large distribution centers. The company decided to move from a best-of-breed to a best-of-suite strategy, selecting JDA’s demand management, replenishment, and promotions optimization solutions.
Case Study
Driving Out the Competition
NFT, a leading provider of time-sensitive, chilled food and drink logistics services in the UK, was facing operational challenges that were preventing it from optimizing performance. The company's traditional pick-face approach was leading to underutilization of its 220,000 square-foot warehouse, immense SKU proliferation, and almost unmanageable replenishments and put-backs. Additionally, the way manufacturers produced their products was creating issues with sell-by dates and misrotation, leading to waste, extra administrative burden, fines, claims, penalties, returns, and rejections. NFT wanted to protect its business reputation, preserve customer sales, and improve performance.
Case Study
Bottling Success
Pepsi-Cola & National Brands Ltd., an independent retail distributor and bottler of Pepsi-Cola and Dr Pepper Snapple Group brands, was facing challenges with its immense number of stock-keeping units (SKUs). Rising wages, concerns around productivity, inventory visibility, breakage, and stock rotation led the company to evaluate its systems and seek new technology. The company decided to invest in a warehouse management system (WMS) and workforce management (WFM) technology to help reduce costs, improve processes, and enhance its relationship with union employees.
Case Study
High-Tech Products, High-Tech Forecasting
Fujitsu Network Communications, a provider of diverse range of products to the telecommunications and cable industries, was facing challenges in accurately forecasting demand and responding efficiently to changing customer needs. The company was using spreadsheets for all its forecasting and planning, which was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process involving around 25 people and taking about six weeks to produce a 12-month rolling forecast. This process was not providing their suppliers with the visibility they needed. Fujitsu wanted to reduce the number of people involved in the process, produce an 18-month rolling forecast every month, and improve forecast accuracy.
Case Study
DSW Makes Every Foot Count with Optimized Fixed Store Capacities
DSW, a leading U.S.-based footwear specialty retailer, faced a strategic challenge due to the fixed capacity of its branded locations. The stores, which average over 20,000 square feet and feature approximately 24,000 pairs of shoes and accessories, had limited backrooms to keep excess merchandise. This necessitated exacting assortment management for each market. The existing supply chain processes and technology tools only focused on the highest levels of the business and overall metrics. The planning was done in dollars at the department level, which was not sufficient for the company's needs. DSW saw an opportunity to drop down to a deeper level planning solutions and realize significant benefits.
Case Study
Managing Rapid Growth
Glazer’s Distributors, a company selling wine, spirits and malt beverages to big-box retailers, bars, restaurants and liquor stores, was experiencing rapid growth. Its total sales of $400 million in the mid-1990s would eventually reach $3.2 billion by 2010. Its inventory was also expanding to include more than 47,500 individual products, held in 29 regional distribution centers. The company could no longer rely on spreadsheet-based processes and legacy systems, and needed a more sophisticated platform to make faster and better supply chain decisions. The company needed a reliable demand-driven supply chain that focuses on customer service, supports vendor collaboration and optimizes inventory.
Case Study
A Long-Term Partnership
Shoppers Stop, India's largest department store chain, was facing challenges with its store replenishment process. The retailer was using a fixed-stock method of replenishment, which did not always ensure that the best-selling stores received new styles first. In some categories, inventory was over- or under-stocked, and stock transfers between stores added to internal supply chain pressures and costs. As the overall scale of the business grew, store replenishment was becoming more cumbersome. Shoppers Stop needed an automated, intelligent solution that would ensure that its stores receive the right amount of merchandise that will sell, and enable it to manage store replenishment by category.
Case Study
Bouncing Back
Fairchild Semiconductor, a major player in the semiconductor industry, faced significant challenges following the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. The industry experienced an unprecedented downturn, followed by a dramatic upturn in customer demand, driven by computing and mobile technologies. Fairchild Semiconductor had to deal with extremely volatile demand, a global shortage of manufacturing capacity, growing lead times, and scarce supply. The company reported first quarter 2010 sales of $378 million, up 7 percent from the prior quarter and 69 percent higher than the first quarter of 2009. To offset this increase in demand, Fairchild Semiconductor needed to increase manufacturing capacity and capabilities with minimal capital investment.
Case Study
Dr Pepper Snapple Group Transforms Its Category Management Process
Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPS), one of North America’s leading refreshment beverage companies, was facing a challenge in mass producing store-specific planograms on a large scale to meet the changing needs of their retail customers without draining their time and resources. The company’s goals were to improve the accuracy rate, increase efficiency, boost retail partnerships without increasing headcount and reducing excess inventory to achieve increased cash flow. The company sells its diverse and popular soft drinks to top franchise businesses like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other independent bottling companies throughout North America. With category management a core competency, the beverage company’s space, assortment and speed-to-insight capabilities are continuously evolving.
Case Study
Milking Supply Chain Success
Tnuva Food Industries Ltd., a major player in the food industry, was facing challenges in efficiently delivering its highly perishable products to the right place at the right time and in the correct quantities. The company aimed to achieve high service levels while minimizing excess inventory. The short lifespan of their products added to the complexity of the situation. The company needed a solution that could support operations in five dairies and distribution centers throughout Israel, including two of the most advanced and sophisticated logistics centers in the world.
Case Study
The Flexible Supply Chain
SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, needed to increase its supply chain flexibility and responsiveness to customer demand. As the company's business grew, it needed to migrate from homegrown, spreadsheet-based planning tools to robust, scalable solutions that would support its expanding original equipment manufacturer (OEM) channels and retail presence. SanDisk sought an integrated advanced planning solution that would help the company maintain profitable growth and maximize its margins while continuing to meet customer demand and increase customer satisfaction.
Case Study
One Supply Chain Does Not Fit All
Altera Corporation, a pioneer and leader in programmable logic solutions, serves more than 12,000 customers worldwide, with annual revenues of $1.9 billion. However, recent market changes and organizational growth over the past decade prompted Altera to reevaluate its supply chain strategy. Adapting to external changes like new government regulations and industry consolidation, as well as managing more complex products and various distribution channels, were impacting the company’s supply chain. The company recognized that change is the new norm, and therefore, it needed to be continuously evolving in order to ensure supply continuity and velocity. Altera increased external and internal forecast collaboration, and invested in business process improvement and integrated planning systems to accelerate the speed of information exchange.
Case Study
Charlotte Russe Leverages JDA’s Retail Solutions to Meet Its Customers’ Fashion Needs Across All Channels
Charlotte Russe, a rapidly growing retailer, operates more than 500 stores in the U.S. in addition to its online and mobile shopping platforms. The company excels in delivering a differentiated brand experience that embraces the Charlotte Girl’s on-the-go lifestyle. However, the existing system infrastructure and associated business processes were limiting the company’s ability to grow, operate quickly and efficiently, and keep pace with both its customers’ demands and the competitive environment. Prior to the upgrade, the Charlotte Russe team was spending numerous hours each day manually uploading spreadsheets across various functions, which left the team with little time to analyze or act on the data. Due to some inefficient business processes, the company also experienced delays in getting purchase orders to its vendors, a core requirement of its business.
Case Study
Doctoring Up the Supply Chain
Pharmaceutical suppliers and retailers in Denmark operate in a tremendously complex environment. Every two weeks suppliers must submit product pricing to the government without having any knowledge of how their competitors will price similar pharmaceutical products. The government then selects among bids for the lowest-priced prescription drug, which serves as the only one that it will fully reimburse for a given two-week period. After those two weeks, the process starts all over again. One company excelling in this highly competitive market is Nomeco A/S, Denmark’s largest pharmaceutical wholesaler with a 70 percent market share. Specializing in health logistics, Nomeco is an international center of excellence for the Danish pharmaceutical industry and part of the wholly owned subsidiary of the Finnish company Tamro – the largest distributor of pharmaceuticals in Northern Europe, Poland and the Baltic countries.
Case Study
Southern African Retailer PEP Relies on JDA to Keep Internal Costs Low — Creating Benefits for Shoppers
PEP, Southern Africa’s largest single-brand retailer, operates at the low end of the market, providing a critical service to low-income families across the southern nations of Africa. The company strives to price its clothing, footwear, and housewares as low as possible to make them attainable for consumers. This focus on low prices necessitates maximum efficiency and cost control across its supply chain. However, PEP struggled to keep its stores in stock with merchandise due to long lead times and inaccurate orders. The company's ordering calculations were not very advanced and did not take into account all of the constraints. PEP needed technology that would help it achieve more sophisticated order calculations.
Case Study
Perfecting the Product Position
Office Depot France, a leading European office products reseller, operates 56 stores across France, selling more than 9,000 products. The retailer creates planograms for all of its product ranges, providing each individual store with its own set. However, with numerous physical stores and a large product range to support, the retailer previously relied on a manual Excel-based process to create and compare its planograms. This time-consuming process for analyzing and comparing planograms for different stores could take up to two hours per planogram. In addition, Office Depot France’s merchandise planning team encountered numerous data inconsistencies, as there wasn’t a link between the floor and space planning data that was being produced. As a result, it was becoming difficult for Office Depot France to conduct range reviews and make planogram changes in an efficient manner.
Case Study
Dramatically increasing sales and profitability
Grupo Marti, the largest sporting goods retailer in Latin America, was facing challenges with inventory control and out-of-stock conditions in stores due to rapid expansion and reliance on manual processes and Excel spreadsheets for planning replenishments. As the company grew from 39 stores to over 270, these methods proved inadequate. The company was also struggling with maintaining focus on their basic products, which were a significant part of their business. Another challenge was the inability to factor in seasonality and promotions into their replenishment plans. Communication between stores and operations on inventory plans was also a problem. Marti wanted to extend the view of inventory and demand beyond their operations to improve communication with suppliers and optimize the overall supply chain.
Case Study
LG Electronics Optimizes Its European Logistics With JDA Transportation Solutions
LG Electronics, a global leader in technology innovation and market leadership, faced a significant challenge in its European logistics network due to exponential growth over the past decade. The company's logistics control was traditionally outsourced to various third-party logistics providers, resulting in limited visibility and control, and a reactive management style. This outsourcing also led to information bottlenecks and dependency on third parties for any innovation in transportation planning. LG Electronics Europe was also relying on an outsourced manual transportation planning system with fixed routing methodologies, which limited its ability to optimize loads, carriers, and overall capacity. As a result, LG was not able to control all costs efficiently. The company sought to consolidate and upgrade its European logistics operations by bringing control in-house, aiming to proactively measure performance and continuously improve in terms of both service and costs.
Case Study
KappAhl Capitalizes with Allocation Precision
KappAhl, a leading Nordic retailer, was facing challenges with its allocation system. The company was performing approximately 3,800 allocations per night on two home-grown systems, which were no longer meeting the demand. The former systems were automated but did not allow the company to work at the lower level of detail required to achieve its goals. With 12,000 unique style/color combinations per season across 400 stores in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Poland, KappAhl needed greater flexibility and expanded capabilities to improve sales while maintaining margins.
Case Study
Embracing Innovation
United Facilities, a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, was facing challenges with its warehouse management processes. The company's legacy warehousing system was becoming too expensive to maintain, and it was struggling to provide efficient service and savings for its customers. The company was also dealing with an increase in fractured ordering, where customers place the same orders multiple times a day. This was leading to inefficiencies in the picking process, as workers had to visit the same bays multiple times to pull products for the same orders. Additionally, one of its customers had set an ambitious goal of realizing significant savings over several years.
Case Study
SPDL Reduces Its Annual Logistics Costs by $1.2 Million With JDA Transportation Modeler
São Paulo Distribuição e Logistica (SPDL), a strategic venture between two of Brazil's largest newspaper groups, O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo, was facing the challenge of continuously optimizing their distribution costs in the face of skyrocketing fuel costs and the proliferation of online news sources. SPDL's transportation network serves more than 900 cities and 700,000 last-mile distribution locations, with 1,250 vehicles traveling more than 100,000 kilometers each day. Despite having a mature operation, SPDL was seeking greater levels of efficiency. They were relying on spreadsheets and manual analysis techniques, and there were no additional savings opportunities that they could identify. They had systematically and thoroughly reviewed every truck route, using the tools they had available.
Case Study
Spreading the News
Presstalis, a leading media distribution company in France, manages more than 3,600 magazines and newspapers from around the world. The company needed to ensure that these publications are displayed in a way that promotes sales growth across its customers’ retail outlets in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. This was a complex endeavor as media space planning in these countries is often governed by legal restrictions. In France, every publication title can be placed in retail stores and kiosks due to the freedom of press. This results in a vast quantity and diversity of publication titles, meaning Presstalis had to be very efficient in utilizing every inch of available space in retail stores and kiosks.
