How French retail brand Cheerz reduced inventory levels by 30%

At a glance

• Shaved 80% off monthly supply chain operations planning
• Reduced stock levels by 30% with innovative purchasing application
• Ranked 3^rd at the 2024 Supply Chain Awards for the impact of their supply planning in Pigment and the synergies built between Finance and Supply teams
• Time savings allowed for more robust volume forecasts
• Their first year live, annual business planning took just 2 iterations, which were much quicker than previous years’ iterations in Excel
• The finance team is able to contribute more strategically to the business, challenging assumptions armed with accurate data and forecasts
• Put a lot of work into dashboards that would make it easier for non-technical team members to use Pigment
• Marketing team inputs directly into Pigment

From scattered spreadsheets to centralized planning

Before Pigment, Cheerz used Excel for all their business planning needs across the business. With so many functions relying on these spreadsheets to input data, plan for the future and make critical decisions, it was slowing them down massively. The supply chain team, for example, spent a full week every month just on operations planning, and the finance team spent most of their time wrangling different versions and trying to consolidate data across the company’s various opcos.

Not only did Cheerz want a way to save time on planning processes, but they also knew that there was a better solution to enable the finance and operations teams to contribute strategically to the business. This search led them to Pigment, which they were able to implement in just two months. This includes their P&L reporting, annual budgeting and supply chain forecasting.

With Pigment, Cheerz’s forecast is now more granular and accurate, and therefore the team is able to make confident decisions based on the business data. This also allows the operations team to save money within the supply chain, better predicting both workforce capacity and now even materials costs.

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More effective cross-team collaboration in Pigment

One of the most important success factors was for other team members to be able to contribute and input directly. Knowing how critical this would be to the success of the rollout, the team invested time and thought into dashboards designed to make inputs and insights as accessible as possible. This has now made it so that other business partners, including the marketing team, can input directly into Pigment, rather than versions of Excel that may or may not be the right version.

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80% time savings on monthly supply chain planning

Now that the business planning process is in Pigment, the finance team has been able to increase the frequency of their planning from twice yearly to monthly due to how fast and flexible planning is in Pigment.

Additionally, the operations team’s formerly-week-long monthly planning process now takes less than a day, resulting in an 80% time savings that they’ve been able to use to improve forecasts and model additional use cases within the platform.

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30% reduction in inventory levels

Inventory management is a huge challenge for retail businesses, with a need to keep stock levels high enough to fulfill demand without creating a surplus. And though Cheerz had an internally built warehouse inventory management software, it wasn’t automated or connected enough to facilitate intelligent purchasing decisions. These decisions were being made with Excel models, which were slow and difficult to manage.

So, once the demand planning and forecasting applications were complete, the Cheerz team turned their attention to one of the company’s top priorities: reducing business inventory levels. A separate purchasing application was created to facilitate this process, automatically pulling aggregated transaction data daily from their internal stock management tool to inform purchasing decisions.

To implement this application, first the team made sure their Bill of Materials was a strong and stable basis, then dimensionalized the entire thing in Pigment. Each component had different units of measurement, supply chain information, variable costs, etc., and all of this could be built out in Pigment. This granularity means that every component can be accounted for separately, creating an accurate picture of stock levels across the business. 

Within just a few months of launching the application, Cheerz was able to reduce their stock levels by 30%, surpassing their goal. Muriel Pagnier and the team have even been shortlisted for the 2024 Supply Chain Awards for the solution they implemented in Pigment and the great synergies built between their Finance and Supply teams.

Because this application now sits alongside the demand planning and forecasting models, the team is now able to explore demand forecasting based on factors like seasonality, historical trends, and other factors. Their demand forecasting now translates not just to products but to individual components, allowing for more strategic purchasing approaches. The team has also set up Pigment Automations to alert them of low stock levels and consults the application constantly for purchasing decision-making.