Technology Strategy – Build or Tailor a Demand Planning Platform
Advised executive leadership of one of the world’s largest sports apparel and footwear brands about the build vs. buy decision for their global assortment and demand planning platform and let led the vendor evaluation and selection process for the same.
Challenge
One of the world’s largest sports apparel and footwear brand sought to revolutionize its demand planning toolset. The goal was to shift from using disparate plans and tools across various product categories, seasons, channels, and geographies to a single, unified platform. This platform needed to support collaborative, seasonless, analytics-driven, and execution-integrated planning, enabling rapid adaptation to the constantly changing needs of consumers and the company.
Previous attempts to unify planning through software from major vendors had failed, despite multi-year, multi-million-dollar investments. These efforts did not yield scalable or flexible solutions and were often extremely difficult to use. In contrast, the brand had success with building customized solutions in other areas. As a result, the company's technology and business leadership were contemplating whether to develop a retail planning platform in-house or collaborate with an existing planning software company to create a tailored solution.
Engagement
GSynergy was engaged by a partner retail consulting firm to lead the engagement with the brand’s executive leadership to inform their technology strategy. GSynergy provided a senior solution architect with retail planning platform development and product management experience to lead the project and to structure the study to inform the strategic choices. The partner firm provided a senior functional consultant to help elicit and document the functional needs and formulate the functional criteria for solution selection.
The project was conducted in four stages:
1. Assessment and Education
The consultants studied the org-structure of the brand’s merchandise planning function and its current processes and systems. They also studied the IT organization and how it supports the business function through its tools, personnel and processes. Leadership and middle management’s vision and initial thoughts about the future state and needs were analyzed to layout the functional, user experience, software design and IT operational requirements for the unified demand planning platform.
Brand’s business and IT leadership was then educated about the key functions and features of planning platforms that would be needed to solve their needs, the solutions available in the market, and their fit with the brands immediate and future needs. They were also educated about the skills, effort and investment required to build a planning platform from scratch, using data from multiple mature platforms.
With this understanding, the brand’s leadership concluded that the brand’s existing capabilities for technology development and its ability to recruit and retain the talent that could make this effort successful were insufficient. Furthermore, the dollar and time investment that would be required to build those capabilities were prohibitive. It was determined that the brand is much more likely to be successful with tailoring a vendor’s computational capabilities with its custom designed and built user experience than if it were to build the platform from scratch.
2. Formulation of Solution Evaluation Framework
The initial assessment and education laid the foundation for formulating a framework to assess and compare demand planning platforms, whether built in-house, procured off the shelf, or tailored to meet the specific needs of the brand.
The team worked closely with planning, merchandising, user-experience (UX) design, product and technology management, enterprise software architecture, and the software development and support functions of the brand to ensure each function’s needs were addressed and summarized to mutually exclusive but collectively exhaustive criteria that could be objectively tested and measured using capability demonstrations or proof-of-concept (PoC) projects.
To gain confidence in their ability to inform choices for the future, the criteria and framework were vetted against the previously failed efforts. They were then presented to and approved by the executive leadership.
3. Vendor Evaluation Through PoCs
An initial shortlist of vendors was created from the consultant’s broad and deep understanding of the vendor space and their solutions. Initial meetings were arranged with the vendors to explain the needs and evaluation framework to ensure that it met their expectations of their effort to earn the business of the brand.
After an initial RFP, for each vendor, a custom evaluation plan composed of presentations, capability demonstrations, and PoC projects was created. PoC projects were mostly constructed to demonstrate capabilities that are not generally available, or to vet out unproven claims performance, scalability, customizability or operability. Since each vendor’s solution would require significant tailoring, PoC projects were also seen as an opportunity to assess ability to collaborate with the vendor as a strategic partner for developing the technology that the brand’s leadership determined was crucial for their long-term success.
Vendor assessment projects were conducted in parallel to ensure that the brand’s leadership could compare them in the most unbiased manner, and so that learnings could be used to inform the vendors at the same time to minimize experience bias.
4. Vendor Selection and Technology Roadmap
As the vendor evaluations progressed and completed, each vendor was scored for capability fit, delivery confidence, cost, culture fit, and ability to partner for long-term technological growth. Gaps were also identified in their current offerings and each gap was discussed with the vendor’s for their willingness, ability and plans to fill them. The best fitting vendor was selected and the consultants helped write the vendor contracts to ensure that the brand’s future needs will be met by the vendor.
A technology roadmap was then drawn out for the implementation of MVP capabilities, and their high level project needs were also documented. Multiple parallel in-house design and implementation projects were identified to build capabilities that would be needed to achieved the end goal with the use of the vendor’s tailored demand planning platform.
Results
This highly comprehensive and intensive project covering the study of the immediate and long-term needs of several functions, establishing consensus regarding future direction and viable solutions, and deep and thorough evaluation of vendor solutions and delivery capabilities was completed to the satisfaction of the brand’s leadership and management team in a very aggressive timeline of five months. The high level of confidence in and the acute understanding of immediate next steps gained by the brand’s program management enabled it in structuring their contractual agreements with the selected vendor and starting the implementation project within a month of the conclusion of this study.
The brand re-engaged the consulting team to help it kick off the implementation project and lead the design and development of several foundational in-house capabilities that were crucial to building their custom user-experience on top of the vendor platform.