Webinar: A Demand Planner's Daily Routine in the Post-AI Implementation Era

okay so um I propose to begin and I will say one more time that the topic of our webinar today uh demand planner's daily routine and the post AI implementation era and we will begin here so uh the speakers of today's webinar will be Helen Helen our product director and it's me Mark Rose I'm the business development at live here and hey yeah hi guys well uh yeah we can go next Okay so the previous slide please Helen or something something okay that's okay currently guys uh we have a project in 17 countries that live here and we implemented more than 100 of 60 projects and at the moment we have around 100 employees working on our team and

regarding our customers the few words uh so we are actually working with different type of retailers with different verticals and our background is in grocery retail Health and Beauty convenience store supermarkets but we also like had a lot of experience working with electronics oil and gas DIY inter retailers as well so uh regarding our Solutions the Lithia as a platform itself that helps us to automate the different areas of supply chain with the help of AI and machine learning and the platform consists itself of four modules so the first module in here is our inventory optimization this module helps us to automate their replenishment processes both like at the level of your stores and Central warehouses and this module also consists like deep powerful bi module in order to help your demand planners to identify some bottlenecks our promotion management is the solution that intended to manage all of your promotion activities that you have and forecast sales for the promotion periods

our Shelf efficiency uh helps us to cover end-to-end merchandising processes uh starting like from the planogram creation to its execution and Analysis and this helps us uh to create the floor plan first of all put the equipment on it and then create the digitalized planogram and after that control and execute the processes like with the help of our mobile application and this module has a deep and Powerful analytical block as well and our new uh recently introduced solution it's our assortment performance that is solution that allows you to manage the assortments create the assortment metrics and introduce and display the new products aggregate stores by format automatically and tracks analytic and so on so there is a four current solution at our portfolio so yeah and uh just regarding the solutions they are linked with the help of the

platform and our customers who are using um a couple of solutions or all of them they gain some additional edit value from the platform itself because our Solutions are linked with each other and it helps us to help our customers to gain the efficiency and to grow the economical effects of the usage of the whole platform itself okay so uh now we will uh before we will start the core topic of our today's webinar just a couple of uh organizational points uh if you will have some questions um regarding the slides or regarding the content that we will be sharing please put them write them into the chat and we will be it will be great to answer them uh just after the webinar will end and in case of any technical

issues or if something will be wrong with the connection please try to link to zoom for once more time and if it doesn't help please let us know that something is wrong for us to be sure that everything is heard and sing okay so uh to start with our main topic so today we are going to talk about the um working day of the demand planner who is responsible for the purchasing function and for the replenishment function as well and to before to covering this topic we wanted to start our conversation with just a quick reminder um uh regarding the way of the inventory management processes development during the last last decade uh so uh we have done a very long way uh with our

customers in process of uh improving the supply chain starting from 2010s and at that time it was quite usual uh to see the decentralized purchasing function um and replenishment function as well so what does it mean it means that on the level of each store somebody like the store manager was making the purchase orders to suppliers or to the central warehouse and everything was like fully decentralized they in some cases they had some tools and in some cases they they doesn't and they don't and uh it was like way that had some plenty of mistakes just because of the human factor and even now sometimes we're faced with such kind of processes but of course more

rarely and still in in some retail companies there are still decentralized processes of purchase and replenishment in fact it is not something like like a mistake or an issue but um when we are accompanying our customers in the way from decentralized processes to centralized processes we see really fabulous Financial impact on these changes but of course when the processes started to be centralized it is very critical to have the automated tool to cover this processes with the help of the Automation and to cover the so-called routine tasks of the demand planner uh okay so during this years we have seen a lot of changes and challenges

um that were connected with the development of the um of the market uh of course it is the increased competition in retail sector and uh except the new um retail chains that are opening from year to year uh of course we see the new formats and forms of retails such as different types of yacom dark stores and Etc um of course the a rapid speed of innovations that can increase their customer satisfaction and reduce waste if to compare the current state with the state 10 years ago um so basically the approach is the same but the speed of Innovations and the speed of let's say computers just now all this leads us to use all this

Innovative Innovative Technologies to make these processes more efficient and lead to the best customer satisfaction and of course to increase the financial and economical efficiency of the replenishment processes and inventory management as a whole there are decrease in well-known Brands SQ margin I think that it is quite clear and the in increase of in complexity of the supply chain structures Supply structures and supply chain processes so basically all these factors and a lot more all this leads their retail companies and provoke their retail companies to seek the ways of increasing the efficiency and one of the ways in this way is the Improvement and automation of the inventory management processes with the help of the latest

Technologies the routine order generation could be and sanding could be made fully automated and in our practice we have a lot of customers who have basically these processes automated for 1995 and 99 and only 10 5 or 1 is covered manually by demand planners uh but of course not only order generation and sending a lot of other processes could be covered with the help of the automation as well and it is like uh such kind of an uh task like order optimization like prioritizing of orders in case of deficits uh promotional forecast since analytic calculation uh taken into account some vendor vocations preparations to some holidays and Etc so if talking about this process as a whole

it is it is rather complex process that really consists of a lot of different angles and a lot of different participants and the automation of these processes can lead to a significant increase in efficiency uh and uh uh so today uh we will switch just now we will switch to our solution uh and we'll try to uh go through the everyday routine tasks of the demand planner uh we call this person who is responsible for purchase order and replenishments a demand planner but of course this person could be named in just another way it could be structured in terms of different departments but still it will be like from the angle of this person who is responsible for these processes

if you are interested in our experience in terms of the organizational structure of the inventory management we can share our article regarding this this topic um just after the webinar and starting from this point I will give a word to Mark and he will start this thank you Helen so uh currently guys you can see the state of the system like at the beginning of the manager's working day it's our lovely dashboard and this dashboards always letting you know the issues that are any issues that are currently ongoing and for this like kind of uh webinar today we decided to do this kind of like a role play so my name will be Rick and I'm a fictional character for this webinar and I just want to clarify it and in here I'm a demand planner in cherries and good wine company and the majority of orders have

been already sent to the suppliers at the start of the Working Day and before uh implementing the Lithia inventory optimization system I was run into my workplace to not face those nervous suppliers I hope you know what I mean I had a limited time when I needed to send in orders before because I I was doing the halfway automatically and the halfway manually that was the reason why the suppliers were nervous and currently now I'm I came to work and made myself like a cup of coffee uh but I'm absolutely sure that all of my orders of which I'm responsible or the vast majority of them uh they have been already calculated for me and sent to the suppliers on this state um uh Helen do you want to add Awards here uh yes so um I should I should say that uh during this webinar we are not going to cover the algorithms features uh and models

for calculating the demand forecasting and calculating the purchase orders uh if this topic is relevant for you please feel free to contact us uh but but of course during this webinar uh we we will not cover this point but we would love to talk about this in person yeah thanks Mark okay yeah going back to our dashboard guys uh the orders have been actually sent but if I have a certain number of orders that did not like pass the optimization criteria or have any specific or extra lonely time I had to Deep dive into them and analyze them uh and here uh it is possible uh to change the number of orders if I have some information and then like on this point after we change and put a new quantity and set up like the reason why we did it uh on this point the work with the

orders for me ends today so the simply like the way and everything has been already completed from this side so uh going back to our dashboards I also pay the attention to our new skus that have been introduced to the assortments and usually there are workouts in the terms of determining the first order for the new skus automatically and still for some reason they can be some skus a few of them that need to get a look at it so usually it's done automatically but the system based on the cluster analysis and the similarity of this SKU with the existing sqs but this is also like automated process and on this point um I finished my regular task everyday routine connected with the orders and the new ad introduced test you use and I also have some indicators of our lost sales and over stocks which are

calculated on a daily basis in our case and compared to the same day of the last week uh it's important like for me to see the strands and if this trend is deterrogating I will go to analyze the reason so we can view skus here and for example um I will take our like 10 skus here and goes through them step by step and then I will need to get like uh just a few seconds and yeah Helen can you please open the graph okay thanks and we can see that here here we have some accesses before we order something wrong a long time ago and in this case I will go to the category manager and say that I need to return this this like skus to the supplier because I know that these suppliers accept the returns so uh in this case I will do the same

with our lost sales in the process of the continuous Improvement of the supply chain so the next part guys that I want to cover for you so I will move on the Strategic dashboard and in here I will analyze it on a weekly basis like for example today is a Monday and today I need to understand like whether everything is fine with the key indicators for my sites it's worth like to pay attention to the fact that despite the level of our estimation there are still problems such as shortages problem with suppliers I would say like late deliveries changes and Trends or competitors promotion currently and many other factors that are poorly predictable but have a strong impact on our supply chain and of course I understand that a category manager that's me in my case so also pay attention but it's also very important for me because I'm a responsible for the inventory turnover

and for the availability to see the trends of these indicators and to be sure that in terms of inventory there is no problem and everything like is going into the right direction and why do you consider this specific indicators uh like the inventory turnover and the availability to be so important for you yeah thank you for a question Helen and also guys yeah I want to mention one more time so if you have any question or you want to like to get some information regarding some specific Parts just don't hesitate and shoot them to our chats so going back to Helen's question so in our company like we believe that inventory turnover and availability it's the most important criteria for us because the inventory turnover shows us their money like the amount of Frozen money and at the other hand like the availability showed us if we're keeping the stock on the shelves and all of our products that

are in the store Matrix are presented on the shelves that's I think that's the answer in here okay okay thank you uh so let's move on uh to the dashboard and the daily tasks and my fiction character um would be Rita and I am the colleague um uh as and as well at a demand planner for for the company and I will go to the next tasks that will be connected with some unlogical things from the system points of you um I today I have two errors uh considering the information regarding the order accuracy and the promotional products uh just a couple of words regarding the promotional activities of course all this information could be transferred from the Erp system to the leaf inventor optimization we are the

data exchange and we are keeping track of course uh regarding the efficiency of the today's data exchange and not in all companies it is possible to get all the necessary data for starting and preparing to promotional activities but in case this data is available we are taking all the data from the Erp system um making all the calculations and the forecasts on our side and starting their promotional activity fully automatically without any human intervention but in case if not all the information regarding the promotional activities regarding the promotional mechanics and types some historical data regarding and data regarding the prices and the percentage of percentages of discount is available in the Erp system

in this case this data need to be set in the system itself but today as we are just covering the process as automated as possible we will talk about this process in case it is full automated but despite the fact of the 100 automation of of this data in some cases we can have some issues regarding the promotional uh promotional items so in here we have some active promotional activities with misconfigured items and what does it mean we can deep dive into each particular ask you and see whether we have some problems with starting the 4K testing processes or starting the promotional activity let's go through uh let's go to the to an example of this promotional activity here we have the

details of this upcoming promotional campaign the start date the end date and some general setting for this upcoming promotional campaign uh and in here we see that uh some number of skus uh were forecasted uh and everything is fine they are highlighted with green color and vice versa we have a number of skus that do not have the initial promotional um promotional forecast because of some reason and here we highlight the reason for a not calculating the forecast uh for this particular skus and in this particular case the main reason is that we will not have orders and until the end date of the upcoming promotional campaign so basically we will not have an opportunity even to make the purchase

order so in this case we need to decide whether to make some purchase orders not due to the supplier schedule or to change some settings of the promotional campaign in terms of the end days or some other variants so making some managerial decisions in terms of promotional preparation and promotional skills and going back to the errors we have some problems with the order accuracy and the system highlights that uh today for me I have some items that are active in in the assortment range but basically uh it is not possible to make the purchase order because of the absence of the supplier schedule and here is the list of all these items we can work through

them so basically there are 53 such kind of ask use in terms of the locations and yeah they really don't have the supplier schedule and we need to check if everything is okay with this particular supplier and his supplier schedule and add the supplier schedule to the system um basically in more in in the vast variety of the situation it would be the information in the Erp system that will transfer to the lithium Venture optimization solution but still we need to take it into account as well uh of course there are a lot of different features connected with this is analytic calculation uh connected with the order optimization parameters uh that's our needs to be taken into account by the system uh but all this is done mainly due during the implementation process and as a state

at the state of the start of the Working Day of the demand planner it is pretty all that he will need to take into account if the processes are fully automated uh and um what uh what else could be done by the demand planner if he uh doesn't um waste his time on this routine task of the order calculation and in the previous example um like going to the working place for eight o'clock in the morning to cope with all the orders because the suppliers were waiting for them and just now I will pass the word to Mark as well to talk about the analytical module which is considered to be very important in the process of ongoing improvements yeah thank you Helen so I will add here

that with a high level of automation still mistakes are happening in the supply chain and this is like related to the reliability of the suppliers all kind of Spike of demands all like Trends all your seasonal duties and a lot can actually go wrong because it's a very unstable environment guys and therefore it's very important for us to analyze like the different angles of our like supply chain and now uh we will show you how you can like very quickly analyze a negative Trend and we will start with our like for like analysis so in this in this report just give it a second so we will see and comparison periods of time and we can build a life for like in terms of like our months quarters weeks and years as well like for example we will build it in terms of months and we will compare May and September and what do we see here so we see our

most important like Inventory management kpis like average stocks our sales our average our stocks our low sales our turnover our percentage of availability as well so in our analysis like we see that uh we have some issues with our stocks and our stocks and we have like some issues with the law sales as well and we need to discover them and drill down more to find out the reason of this current problem so uh to find out more uh we will go to our next reports uh to low sales reason and let's give it a second okay so for example we want to investigate the reason of the most like of the Lost sales and that's why we are going to the specific reports that Helen is already opened that's lost sales for our three previous weeks and where the system like helped us to identify like a specific SKU with the Lost sales during

the previous week in terms of our like amount of money so let's open the SKU okay apricot jumbo weights and in this case we see guys that for the previous week only we lost almost six thousand dollars and it's the issues that we understand it's the reason of the Lost sales so all the reasons of our like sales are grouped in this diagram and we see that the structure of the reasons for the Lost sales and for more than 40 percent in our case of all cases in terms of our loss sales we see that they are cured because of our external supplier didn't fulfill the orders that Warren send like hit to him so we need to understand more and we are choosing this reason and we can name uh like visualization uh we can change like set it up like based on supplier name and in terms of our suppliers and we see that the most

problematic supplier in our case is the supplier number three four five so uh to analyze more we will go to the suppliers reports and definitely we will need to understand like uh more regarding our supplier reliability so uh the next reports will be like is connected to the suppliers and there was like uh the list of our suppliers before and here we see that number of supplier numbers three four five um and also like we can investigate the indicators based on this supplier like the indicators like the share of our purchase and sales they're sharing our like currency of the company the balances of turnover the Overstock and loss sales as well and as well the trend of the suppliers reliability and we see that yes it's decreased a lot and

basically the category manager must contact with the supplier and ask him and understand why it happened and maybe like uh make some other decisions either like to change the supplier or make some negotiations with supplier and so on so guys uh on this point yeah I will say that uh it was just an example like how can we understand what the cost of our blood problem is but as well you can also analyze the inventory and we have like a function in the system that helps us to understand what to do in this point and we can return them to the supplier if agreed upon with the supplier before and we can do promo or we can do internal relocation and we have like a special mechanism where the system uh itself like will determine it for you and like what and where to move

like those skus and uh as a rig like the fiction fictional character I have a like some artist schedule during the week of what analysis I I do at what day and it helps our company actually to earn more and and our suppliers most of the time are very happy with the interaction with us and ask like what is the like what is the secret of our successes so the secret is simple it's leave your inventory optimization you know everything so yeah on this point I will pass the word to hell and that's it from my side covering the reports and guys if you still have some questions or you wanna some like some more specification or details just don't hesitate we have a chat in here shoot us your questions and we will be able to answer to them thank you okay thank you thank you Rick very much uh and uh just uh to summarize uh everything that was set regarding the

system functionality of course uh the system covers all the all the replenishment processes and all the processes that are connected with the purchase orders uh throughout the retail chain and to the external suppliers to make these precise orders and for the our customers and Retail companies to rely on the system we are using the latest Technologies uh for making all the calculations and basically making the most accurate demand forecasting of course during the 30 minutes we have covered only like very um in a in a kind of a helicopter view how this process can look like during the implementation process we are building these processes for each and every company with each with this particular specifics with the data that

is actually in the Erp system and understanding which data is absent and which data need to be collected additionally in our solution as well depending on the structure of the department that is responsible for these tasks and a lot a lot more other factors that influence like the architecture of these processes but still as we have started all these processes could be automated and the percentage of this automation could be very high with the help of the technologists but still people are involved in these processes and still people are needed um like to go through the indicators understanding the trends of the indicators and understanding like the root cause of the

problem and in the way of eliminating the root cause of problems in the supply chain only in this case it is possible like to improve the indicators in the long term perspective just after the implementation all our customers have this great results because the processes were automated or they were automated previously and just now they are automated in a better manner with the help of the better algorithms and Etc but still when our aim is a long-term Partnerships with our customers that's why we are interested in the long-term perspective and the long-term Improvement of these indicators and it is possible with the help of the Automation and with the help of understanding the trends and understanding the indicators involving

into this process and improving it and uh just one more uh one more slide before we will finish the presentation for today uh how can we how we can get there uh it is obvious but sometimes it is not obvious in the projects that we definitely need to have very clear understanding of the goal before the beginning of any kind of changes um this process seems to be rather obvious I mean the process of the purchasing and the process of the internal replenishment but still there are a lot of there is a lot of issues so there are a lot of issues in this processes which need to be worked with and eliminated during the implementation process and usually this process takes a

while and it is not done like during uh some couple of days so before starting it was very clear it is very crucial to understand their goal uh the second point is this processes first and automation is second um before starting any kind of automation it is crucial to illuminate this house and processes and that have some issues that's why first of all in all our projects we tend to um improve processes first of all and afterwards build this automation on the basement of correct processes intelligent Technologies intelligent data to use the latest Technologies like machine learning for example we definitely need to have a plenty of data and this data needs to be collected this data needs to

be clean and this data needs uh need to exist that's why in a lot of cases even with customers with very high level of operational efficiency we face with the absence of the necessary data especially for the long-term forecasting and for um promotional forecasting as during the process of the promotional forecasting a lot of factors influence and are used in the promotional forecasting so collecting the data and storing this data is a very tough task but necessary to use their intelligent Technologies of course reliable Partners so in each specific sphere it is better to work with professionals and as the retailers are Professionals in their retail sector I.T companies like ours can help retailers to improve

their processes in terms of automation as we are Professionals in I.T Technologies and of course big changes big efforts any project is a project and really needs to so you definitely need to be prepared for given this efforts to make the all the necessary changes in this processes I think that it is pretty all in case of any questions please type them into the chat or you can contact us and we will be happy to answer them in person yes thank you thank you guys uh thank you Helen and yeah sorry I will specify one more time that in case like you have some questions unanswered you can reach us out by those phone numbers or just send us an email and we we are like

looking forward to respond you so guys yeah thank you one more time for your time and it was nice to see you here thank you for joining our webinar I hope it was like productive for you and thank you Helen for hosting it with me yeah thank you