Global retailer transforms supply chain & demand planning with Pigment

At a glance

Fashion evolves as fast as ever, but consumer demand has become increasingly unpredictable. This global fashion retailer, the powerhouse behind two iconic global fashion brands, operates across a vast and dynamic retail ecosystem.

With product development, production, and distribution spanning 27 countries and multiple market segments, efficient supply chain planning is essential for the company’s global success. 

And that’s exactly what they got with Pigment:

• Unified demand forecasting: Created a single source of truth by integrating commercial insights and brand strategy leading to efficiency and time-savings across planning teams.
• Cross-functional alignment: brand, commercial, and supply chain teams now collaborate seamlessly in real time.
• Fit for scale and AI-ready: Autonomous in its strive for continuous improvement with over 50% of planning applications being self-built in Pigment, with an efficient supply chain and demand planning process in place, they are ready for AI integration to continue powering growth. 
• Real-time visibility: Intuitive, user-friendly dashboards and exception reporting improved decision-making and risk mitigation across the supply chain.

Hemmed in by spreadsheets

Before the implementation of Pigment, the company’s supply chain planning was limited by fragmented systems and disconnected workflows. The company’s demand forecasting process was spread across brand, commercial, and supply chain teams, working from different spreadsheets and systems. This made it difficult to create a unified and reliable forecast.

The reliance on manual Excel-based processes created inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Planning cycles were slow and labor-intensive. These delays limited the ability to respond quickly to shifts in market demand or supply chain disruptions.

Finally, without effective scenario planning, teams struggled to anticipate potential risks or quantify new commercial opportunities. Operational challenges such as prolonged warehouse holding times further compounded the problem, as the company lacked real-time visibility into inventory flows.

Tailoring a new planning process

In 2023, the retailer set up a dedicated demand planning team tasked with designing a new, unified planning process. That process involved Pigment at the core, with a supply chain planning implementation taking just three months. They then extended to demand planning just one month later.

This team focused on creating a single source of truth for demand forecasts by integrating two crucial perspectives: commercial inputs from sales teams across Regions and Channels, and product-focused insights from the brand teams. These contributions were seamlessly consolidated in Pigment through the integrated demand planning (IDP) process, resulting in a unified, reliable forecast. This alignment not only strengthened cross-functional collaboration but also ensured the business was operating from a shared set of assumptions.

The team then leveraged Pigment’s scenarios functionality for what they call “base and drive models”, a set of scenario plans to run different assumptions and better understand what actions were required to hit demand targets, and where additional opportunities could be unlocked. The ease of scenario planning allowed their planners to quickly respond to changing market dynamics, improve the accuracy of their projections and help them facilitate conversations with management on what needs to be done in order to achieve the “drive” scenario.

Dashboards in Pigment offer the team real-time visibility into key performance indicators, highlight exceptions, and flag disruptions across the supply chain as they occur. This radically changed the way in which they ran their quarterly forecast meetings. Now, the retailer brings together finance, commercial, and supply chain stakeholders to align planning decisions with financial performance targets. 

Rather than preparing hundreds of different Excel files, hundreds of templates that teams had to consolidate manually, Pigment gave them a common platform that everybody can access and collaborate in.

Stitching integrated supply chain planning with Pigment

This team built a robust and agile supply chain planning process by leveraging Pigment as one of their central platforms for Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP). Their approach integrates weekly and monthly planning cadences, scenario analysis, and exception monitoring to ensure seamless coordination across inbound logistics and warehouse operations.

At the core of the process is weekly inbound and processing planning, which provides end-to-end visibility into incoming shipping containers and warehouse capacity. This view allows operational teams to prioritize high-demand stock and align processing activities with business targets. On a monthly basis, buying and planning teams contribute their “buy plans” (future stock they intend to purchase but haven’t yet ordered), enabling long-range visibility into expected inventory flows. This forward-looking alignment helps identify and mitigate potential warehouse capacity bottlenecks before they materialize.

To further enhance tactical planning, the team uses Pigment’s scenario functionality to simulate adjustments to the method of transport. For instance, when excess warehouse capacity is forecasted for week 4, planners can evaluate the impact of changing certain purchase orders from ocean to air freight, potentially advancing delivery timelines and capitalizing on unused capacity. This simulation not only helps optimize warehouse throughput but also balances cost implications, informing actionable recommendations for procurement to update orders accordingly.

A cornerstone of the process is real-time exception reporting, which identifies operational risks such as delayed container departures due to missed port cut-off dates. By tracking these discrepancies, the team can take proactive measures to realign timelines, monitor recurring issues at specific ports, and ultimately reduce delays between production completion and stock handover—achieving up to a 20% seasonal improvement in delay mitigation.

Dressed to impress

The transformation achieved by the company’s project team in delivering Pigment was both rapid and impactful. The leap in efficiency enabled the team to reallocate time and resources to higher-value strategic tasks and respond to market trends with significantly greater agility.

Key outcomes and benefits from implementing Pigment across supply chain and demand planning include:

• A single source of truth: The implementation also led to the establishment of a centralized, trustworthy source of future demand data. By integrating commercial and brand forecasts into a single number, the business eliminated the confusion and misalignment that often plagued planning discussions. This improved visibility and confidence across teams, creating a more collaborative planning environment. Real-time insights into inbound flows enable early intervention and reducing disruptions.‍
• Operational efficiency: On the operational front, the business saw clear improvements in inbound logistics, warehouse efficiency, outbound service levels and processing priorities. Pigment streamlined the post-production handover process, improving turnaround times and reducing seasonal delays by up to 20%.‍
• Tactical risk mitigation: Weekly projections integrate known supply signals and upcoming purchase plans to anticipate and resolve future challenges.‍
• Enhanced cross-functional collaboration: Collaboration across the organization improved remarkably. With supply chain, finance, and commercial teams aligned around shared dashboards and KPIs, the organization gained the ability to proactively identify risks and opportunities, align supply to demand targets, and make faster, more informed decisions. Quarterly alignment meetings became more productive and data-driven, thanks to real-time insights and an intuitive interface. Continuous coordination with buying teams enables transparent, proactive problem-solving across production, inbound, and warehouse operations.‍
• System of record: Pigment allows them to keep track of all their different planning cycles, enabling them to access historical data on demand.‍
• Data-driven decisions: Continuous use of analytics sharpens planning accuracy and supports strategic refinement over time.‍
• Automony: Over 50% of the company’s planning applications are now built directly in Pigment by team members themselves, demonstrating the tool’s ease of use but also signals a cultural shift toward more empowered, data-driven decision-making.‍
• Automated calculations: Pigment automatically translates different units of measure across teams. For example, the warehouse measures work in cartons, while planning teams focus on pieces.

Threading into the future

Looking ahead, the company is excited to continue pushing boundaries with Pigment. Their next steps include improving currency translation for global forecasting, and increasing the granularity of projections to support even more precise, tactical decision-making. Additionally, they plan to use Pigment’s AI capabilities to optimize reporting, automate updates and improve productivity.

As global supply chains face continued disruption—from tariffs to geopolitical instability—this retailer’s journey with Pigment highlights the value of resilient, data-driven planning. For more on how businesses can balance short-term agility with long-term strategy, read our article on why disruption demands a bifocal approach to planning.