Challenge
Our client is one of the largest suppliers of private label bottled water in North America. They operate numerous bottling plants in both the United States and Mexico.
Our client already had a Blue Yonder supply chain planning system for corporate demand planning purposes. They embarked on a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) program as a strategic initiative to improve performance to customers and integrate their supply chains through to the retail level. The existing corporate solution was not going to meet their needs for the strategically important VMI initiative. Plantensive became engaged with our client when they were looking for a partner that could recommend an appropriate planning solution for the whole VMI process and ensure that the IT department was not saddled with having to manage another provider on top of the planning solution they already had for corporate demand planning.
Our Solution
Plantensive demonstrated and recommended to expand Blue Yonder’s planning solution to meet the daily demand planning and fulfillment planning requirements coupled with a third-party solution to manage EDI transaction sets to prepare retail level data for integration to Blue Yonder.
Our client needed a quick implementation due to expected growth through the strategic program. Plantensive’s Agile Approach coupled to the Toolkit and Core (TM) was the answer to the speed requirements. It was imperative to enable cost effective and scalable flexibility to a variety of different data & business requirements that could come from future customers. The goal was to create a solution that scales and can be configured from a batch, data and integration perspective such that every new customer did not require a new implementation; rather an onboard and configuration exercise.
The goal was to create a solution that scales and can be configured from a batch, data and integration perspective such that every new customer did not require a new implementation; rather an onboard and configuration exercise. By creating a client solution toolkit of documentation with business requirement assumptions; the client is enabled to understand estimated new customer requirement fit to the solution and thus right size cost & investment to drive customer value for each incremental onboard. This includes customer specific master data mapping and multi-tenancy within the Blue Yonder solution batch to enable economies of scale while avoiding dependencies across customers.
Plantensive’s Managed Services group then provided the hosting platform along with the data transformation and staging capabilities of store-level data interfaces (EDI, POS data) to bring full-service support to the client, removing the IT load completely from the company. Additionally, after the project started, growth was significantly faster than anticipated and they needed a partner that could flex with project team availability.
Our Results
The client implemented a best-in-class planning solution quickly by using our Agile Deployment Methodology. They were also able to integrate their customer’s POS data directly to the platform enabling VMI. This service was technically enabled by Plantensive’s hosting services on AWS and provided our client a strategic platform to reduce inventory and increase margin. Additionally, they became a strategic supplier to some of the largest high-volume national retailers including the largest big box multi-category retail store and the largest dollar, quick inventory turn retailer. Our client continues to engage with Plantensive for current and future work as the use of the solution expands daily within their organization.
Services Provided
- Advisory Services
- Software Selection
- System Implementation
- Master Data Management
- Managed Services & Support
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service
