Business Wire IndiaAditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited (NSE: ABFRL) received an award for Best Integrated Business Planning (IBP) Process in the Apparel Industry using o9 Solutions at the 5th Annual Demand Planning & Forecasting Forum (DPFF) on June 15, 2019 in Mumbai, India. Organized by Institute of Supply Chain Management (ISCM) along with SCMPro, the DPFF Awards recognize the best practices that companies have adopted in demand planning, forecasting, and sales and operations planning (S&OP) in eight award categories. Judges for the awards comprise senior industry professionals in the technology, demand planning and forecasting, business and innovation space.
With more than 9 million engaged customers and a million SKUs, ABFRL is home to India’s biggest apparel labels and is the country’s largest fashion retailer. The company manages a vast distribution network spanning over 2,500 outlets and maintains manufacturing capabilities for some of its categories, and its lifestyle brands lead the market in their respective segments.
To support this high-volume business, ABFRL recognized that it could not continue using manual, disconnected processes and spreadsheet-based planning that were error-prone, time-consuming, and provided limited visibility into demand and supply. With the goal to enable real-time collaboration, inventory management, visibility, and end-to-end connectivity across its supply chain, ABFRL embarked on a digital transformation journey in partnership with o9 Solutions.
ABFRL chose o9 solutions based on the flexibility of the platform and its intuitive end-user experience that seamlessly connects with existing tools. Today with o9, the fashion retailer has standardized its IBP process, strengthening inventory planning and review across all brands. o9 has been instrumental in transforming planning operations at ABFRL including:
- Long-range planning/S&OP
- Pre-season and in-season demand management
- Constraint-based supply planning
- Capacity planning and fabric planning
Leveraging the o9 platform, ABFRL has improved service levels with vendors and partners, and reduced costs related to raw materials, capacity and inventory. In the first year after going live on the o9 platform, ABFRL’s benefits have included:
- Reducing past-season inventory by 9% in FY18
- Increasing finished goods inventory turns by 10% in FY18 while experiencing a 15% average increase in finished goods sales revenue
On asking feedback from ABFRL, Sivasankar Selvan, Assistant Manager, Central Planning S&OP, ABFRL, stated, “o9 has become the way of life!”
“Aditya Birla is one of the few fashion retailers who is a Brand Manufacturer, so we needed to implement a platform that could not only handle around a million style codes for our fashion retail business, but also provide intelligent information to produce, procure fabric and manage capacity planning across Production Units,” said Mr Swaminathan R, COO - Central Sourcing, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited. “The o9 platform had the flexibility and power to address our unique challenges, while enabling us to bring greater speed, accuracy, and collaboration to our planning and decision-making processes.”
Speaking on behalf of o9 Solutions, Chakri Gottemukkala, Co-Founder and CEO, stated, “The o9 platform enables companies to easily automate mission-critical processes, powering intelligent solutions to their most complex challenges across planning and operations.” He added, “The complexity inherent in today’s trend-driven fashion retail business is significant. The efficiency and effectiveness improvements that ABFRL has achieved using the o9 platform serve as a testament to the strength of o9 solutions, the ABFRL commitment to transformation and the partnership between our two companies.”
ABOUT o9 Solutions, Inc.
o9 Solutions is the premier AI-powered platform for driving digital transformations of integrated planning and operations capabilities. o9's clients span a variety of industries across manufacturing and retail supply chain. Whether it is driving demand, aligning demand and supply, or managing P&L, any process can be made faster and smarter with o9's AI-powered digital solutions. Bringing together technology innovations—such as graph-based enterprise modeling, big data analytics, advanced algorithms for scenario planning, collaborative portals, easy-to-use interfaces and cloud-based delivery—into one platform, o9 empowers organizations with superior visibility and insights that are both predictive and prescriptive. With o9's AI-powered solutions, enterprises can achieve faster, smarter decision making and execution.
For more information, visit http://www.o9solutions.com
ABOUT Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited
Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited (NSE: ABFRL) is a part of USD 44.3 billion Aditya Birla Group. With a revenue of around USD 1 Billion and a retail space of 7 million sq. ft., it is India’s first billion-dollar pure-play fashion powerhouse with an elegant bouquet of leading fashion brands and retail formats. ABFRL hosts India’s largest fashion network with over 11,000 points of sale, which include close to 2,500 exclusive ABFRL brand outlets across 750+ cities and towns, 4,900+ multi-brand outlets and 4000+ department stores across the country. Find out more at https://www.adityabirla.com/businesses/companies/aditya-birla-fashion-and-retail-limited.
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