Client Background
Client is a Mexico based retail giant which operates largest department stores in Mexico. It is a USD 4.5 billion company having 35,000 employees.
Business Objective
Implementation of a sophisticated AI/ML driven IBP platform for Merchandise Financial Planning, Assortment Planning, Replenishment, Allocation, and Demand Planning to achieve business goals. This implementation will help to achieve.
- Annual projections to sales LP, turnover margin.
- Determine OTB.
- Synchronize with daily & weekly goals for salespeople.
- Reconcile with global plan and channel mix.
- Reconcile with assortment.
Solution
Valiance in its role as an implementation partner for IBP solution is responsible for ensuring that datasets required to drive various IBP modules, namely Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP),Assortment Planning (AP) etc are properly understood; documented and business points are mapped. Thereafter source datasets need to be picked from sources like Google Cloud Storage(GCS) with the use of gsUTIL commands written inside batch files , validated, cleaned, transformed and fed into the destination system.
To be able to achieve the above, our team of data architects and data engineers worked with the business and technology team to propose a data architecture based on MSBI technologies specially SSIS. Team completed the data mapping, data models for staging and data load frequencies for different datasets. Over the course of next 12 months we implemented SSIS routines for MFP, AP addressing below scenarios
- Data fetching from Google storage as a UTF-8 compatible text files and dumping into staging tables.
- Data transformations between staging and output tables making sure correct Spanish data to be pushed.
- Duplicate records and bad data quality.
- Recovery from job failures.
- Notification email for success and failure.
- Audit logs for traceability.
Outcome
Successful implementation of data integration will serve as the foundation for the second phase of the project where the process will be enhanced with analytics which will improve forecast accuracy, increase inventory turns, reduce standing orders and lost sales.
At Valiance we have developed precise understanding of relevant data for AFL companies w.r.t demand planning, supply planning, S&OP & IBP. This capability, combined with our ability to correctly analyze all the required data because of our expertise in data science enables us to help such clients increase demand forecast accuracies that directly result in better sourcing precision, and more optimized manufacturing & distribution.
