55 Hours to Minutes: Transforming Planning Cycle Processes – Home Appliances Manufacturing Company

Challenges:

Replace Cumbersome, Ineffective Commercial Business Processes

The company had previously been managing its sales and operations planning (S&OP) process in Excel and Google Sheets. This was an extremely cumbersome and ineffective process due to the thousands of SKUs across different brand categories and customer roll-ups.

While the company was paying $1 million+ annually for bolt-on ML forecasting services, they faced several challenges with forecast result quality and the connectedness of their S&OP process as a whole, siloed between merchandising, sales, supply chain, and finance.

• A high frequency of new product launches and delists without a consistent approach or timely visibility challenged the company to maintain their S&OP plans.
• Members of the team had to manually submit pricing and associated promos for 15,000 SKUs across 150 trade partners every month
• Disparate offline demand planning processes had to be completed for every product category, and these processes had little connection to the company’s overall supply plan. They were also paying $1M+ for ML forecasting with subpar results

The company chose Spaulding Ridge to build capability within their extended S&OP function, including but not limited to product planning, pricing & promotions management, demand planning & ML forecasting, and supply planning.

Solution:

Efficient Long-Term Plan: Integrating Change Management and Client Enablement

Spaulding Ridge helped build a connected planning roadmap for Anaplan globally, spanning multiple business units and regions. This included design, deployment, and the change management support needed to drive sustainable adoption.

Four solutions within or adjacent to S&OP were deployed as a result.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM Planning)

• Created standard workflows with audit trails for project creation.
• Delivered a PLM hub for product management with exception alerting and scenario planning.

Pricing & Promotions Planning

• We connected pricing/promo upstream with PLM and downstream with demand planning.
• Automated price planning, integrating the process with the company’s ERP.

ML Forecasting & Demand Planning

• The solution provided ML-driven POS and Orders forecasts with the ability to adjust tops-down and bottoms-up.
• Imported over three years of historical sales data into the system, allowing the company to better plan for pricing and promotions.
• Enabled automated monthly snapshots so the company could measure their baselines and drive improvement.

Supply Planning & Reconciliation

• The solution provided constrained upstream demand planning with a monthly rough-cut capacity for over 50 production lines.
• Delivered a customer allocation model that accounted for capacity constraints.
• Connected the company’s constrained demand to their monthly outlook and annual plan.