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Case Study 14: Luxury Retailer Master Planning Optimization

A. The Company Industry:

Luxury retail selling high-end fashion, jewelry, and accessories through boutique stores and ecommerce with long supply chain lead times and seasonal demand volatility.

B. What needed to be done:

The luxury retailer experienced challenges with Master Planning generating inaccurate planned purchase orders and transfer orders resulting in stockouts of best-selling items and excess inventory of slow-moving products. The Planning Optimization engine required tuning to incorporate seasonal demand patterns, consider supplier lead time variability, respect minimum and maximum inventory levels by boutique location, and improve forecast accuracy through better demand planning parameters. Additionally, master planning performance needed improvement as planning runs were taking excessively long to complete, delaying replenishment decisions.

C. How Dynatuners accomplished the deliverable:

Dynatuners conducted comprehensive analysis of master planning configuration including coverage groups, item coverage settings, safety stock calculations, and forecast models. The team reconfigured coverage codes to align with product categories—high-value jewelry using min/max planning with safety stock, seasonal fashion using forecast-based planning with trend dampening, and core accessories using reorder point methodology. Supplier lead times were adjusted to reflect realistic procurement timelines including international shipping from European fashion houses and Asian manufacturers with appropriate safety margins. Demand forecasting was enhanced by implementing seasonal forecast models using historical sales patterns and incorporating point-of-sale data to detect trend changes earlier. Action messages were refined by adjusting time fences and action message parameters to reduce planning nervousness from minor demand fluctuations. Performance optimization focused on Planning Optimization service configuration including parallelization settings, appropriate filtering of discontinued items, and optimization of product dimension group settings. Custom SQL analysis identified database bottlenecks in bill of materials explosion and inventory transaction queries which were resolved through indexing and statistics maintenance. The team implemented planned order firming workflows to automate conversion of planned orders to purchase orders within acceptable parameters while flagging exceptions for planner review. Post-implementation monitoring showed planned order accuracy improvement, reduction in stockout incidents, lower excess inventory levels, and master planning runtime reduction from over 2 hours to under 15 minutes enabling multiple daily planning runs.

RELEVANT INFORMATION

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