Background

Our client, with 700 employees and over 70 stores, is one of the largest shoe retailers in Belgium and is still one hundred percent family owned. Their family values, care for their employees and customers, and sustainable development policies play an important role in their mission statement: “360° of care serves 360° of profit."

Challenge

Due to a drop in sell-through for brick-and-mortar stores and a significant increase in sales from their e-shop, our client wanted to optimize the assortment planning process for physical stores to ensure the highest possible sell-through.

Approach

- Capture all relevant information and assortment process insights during a one-week exploratory mission. - Allow a deeper understanding of substitute families for their product assortment with SME’s. - Create a model to compute granular forecasting of sales and stock needs. - Enable the usage of a constrained optimizer on a weekly basis, which outputs a list of shoes to be shipped to ensure a balanced assortment at each store, based on past and future forecasted sales.

Key results

Benefits

The solution decreased stock volumes, increased product rotations, and reduced obsolete and outdated stock, improving the cash flow position of the stores significantly. The higher sell-through rates and formalization of substitute families increased revenue, and the costs related to the assortment planning process were lowered by automating the former manual process.

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