Nomeco, a leading pharmaceutical wholesaler in Denmark, was facing challenges with its legacy replenishment and ERP systems which had become difficult to maintain and develop. The planning tools were unable to integrate with each other, leading to unnecessary manual steps throughout their process. This was particularly problematic every two weeks when prescription drug prices and pharmacy assortments needed to be updated across their network of pharmacies. Furthermore, Nomeco’s pharmacy customers have considerable autonomy in deciding assortments, delivery schedules, delivery sizes, and other parameters. This made forecasting demand and ensuring optimal inventory levels for pharmaceuticals immensely complex and time-consuming. Additionally, the unstable supply chains and frequent supplier stock-outs of prescription medications required providers to identify appropriate pharmaceutical substitutions to meet their customer demand. Nomeco’s systems were not able to support optimally in these situations, which required their planners to manually identify the ideal replacements for these medications.

One Stop, a leading UK convenience store chain and a subsidiary of Tesco, faced challenges in managing the complexity of their product assortment. Their broad product offering ranged from ultra-fresh products with short spoiling times to more ambient inventory with longer shelf life. Demand for many products was sensitive to external factors such as weather, and sales for some products were easily cannibalized by promotions on similar items. These complex forecasting scenarios, in which multiple drivers could overlap and interact to impact demand, required a sophisticated solution. One Stop aimed to increase day-level forecast accuracy for products with demand driven by weather and cannibalization, and improve fresh product availability without seeing a corresponding rise in spoilage.