Case Study

This case study by Pluto7 illustrates how NMK Textiles obtained significant Supply Chain benefits for their Textile Business using Planning-in-a-box solution built using Google Cloud integrating with Tableau and Netsuite

NMK Textiles – Challenge, Solution and Results NMK Introduction

Use cases • Effectively forecast customer demand with

NMK Textile Mills is a product development company

seasonal trends and significant spikes created by

with International presence. It has distribution centers

special sales

in US, manufacturing presence in India and outsourced

• Manage highly optimized distribution supply chain with optimized inventory and high service levels

manufacturing sites in China. Professionally managed, NMK group's core team has more than 25 years of

experience in designing, manufacturing and selling products to leading retailers in North and South

Challenge

America. They have produced goods for Private Label

• Current tool unable to forecast customer demand with any level of accuracy as is Excel based • Currently Factory operations have to deal with

and National Brands for Department stores ( E.g. Macy’s), Mid-price stores, Discount stores, Specialty stores ( Haute Look) , Internet and Catalogues in North

higher fabric costs due to wastage as a result of

America ( Amazon.com ). NMK plans to build its

their inability to react to demand changes.

presence in Europe and South America, while growing in

• Warehousing has to keep high amount of safety

its core US and Canadian Markets.

stock with higher costs and probability of obsolescence

Legacy Approach The current solutions in place at NMK Textiles were

Solution with Planning in a Box

inhibiting the organizations plan to scale. They were

Implement end to end Cloud and SaaS solution that

unable to anticipate and predict the demand changes

forecasts demand, which is then used to run the

which resulted in the factories following a more manual

distributed plan for the factories and the warehouses

scheduling methods and the warehouses maintaining

with following key features:

safety stock was significantly above the industry norm.

• High Forecast Accuracy

The entire planning was largely manual or Excel based.

• Distributed Planning for Warehouse and Factories

• Exception based alerts with multi-media

This resulted in revenue being left on the table as a result of not being able to run at a capacity that was

collaboration for effective shortage resolution and

desired by their customers who then gave that portion

excess reduction

of the business to other suppliers. While keeping high safety stock levels enabled them to meet the desired service levels it resulted in heavy obsolescence and

Results

inventory holding costs that were eating into their

• Executives are able to have a Sales and Operations Plan and improve Revenues

profits. The lack of sophistication in demand management also resulted in their inability to scale their

• Factory and Warehouse Operations are able to

e-commerce channel.

operate at significantly lower inventory levels and

actual improve service levels

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https://planninginabox.com/

NMK Textiles – Challenge, Solution and Results Planning in a Box Solution by Pluto7 It was a meeting between the CEOs of the two companies that led to the solution. When Pluto7 CEO heard the challenges that the CEO of NMK Textiles was describing to him over a small talk at a business conference, he immediately realized that the Cloud SaaS solution that the Pluto7 team has could help NMK Textiles. He quickly

articulated the solution and asked the NMK Textile CEO if he would agree to implement the product and NMK expressed the heightened need to keep pace with the evolution of the Retail Omnichannel and Manufacturing industry. In general The Pluto7 team were quick to realize that the needs of the customer would entail having all the core functionality of their product be used ranging from Demand Planning, Supply Planning, Inventory Visibility to eventually Machine Learning for recommendation engine. This is because what NMK was looking for was an end to end solution that would enable them to do advanced demand management with industry leading forecasting methods and use the same as the driver for the distributed supply chain planning that they needed to drive the factories and warehouses.

The planning-in-a-box Cloud based SaaS solution build on Google Cloud Platform leveraging G-Suite and Tableau for Visual Analytics turned out to be very well suited for this task due to its core features which were as follows: •

Ability to load data from source systems either cloud cased E.g. Netsuite or Excel based with ease.

•

Ease of use in managing multiple data streams to generate forecasts which used highly advanced predictive analytics and machine learning ( on need basis0 to generate forecasts with high accuracy and then selecting the right one to achieve stated KPIs.

•

Use the selected forecast to drive the distributed MRP planning engine that produced plans to drive the factories and the warehouses.

•

Provide Mobile actionable alerts to ensure that the demand planners, warehouse managers and factory managers focused on the items requiring attention right away instead of trying to find the problems.

•

Enabled a collaboration platform to help all actors in the NMK Textile value chain collaborate with each other.

As a result of the entire solution being on a Cloud SaaS architecture it took only 4 weeks ( compared to similar industry products which took many months ) of having the Pluto7 team work with the NMK team to get them play with their data in planning-in-a-box and then start using it for normal business. The results are shown in the figure given below:

Results

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