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American Airlines Cargo, a division of American Airlines, manages more than 36 million ton miles of freight and mail weekly on approximately 180 wide-body and more than 3,200 narrow-body flights each day. The company provides cargo lift capacity to more than 240 cities in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia. However, calculating available cargo capacity on a passenger flight is not as straightforward as it may seem. Not only are there obvious factors such as passenger and baggage forecasts, the amount of fuel on board and equipment weight to consider, but there are also external factors such as airport limits on takeoff and/or landing weights or ground-handling capabilities for tight airport connections that have to be taken into account. The most important factor that affects capacity forecasting accuracy is customer behavior. Bookings on passenger flights are often cancelled, amended or under/over tendered at the last minute. Therefore, forecasting customer tendering behavior is a critical factor that needs to be modeled, using overbooking algorithms to predict the optimal adjustments to capacity in order to minimize spoilage or offloads.

Owens & Minor, a leading distributor of medical and surgical supplies, launched OM HealthCare Logistics (OM HCL) to enhance its leadership position in healthcare supply chain management. OM HCL is a full-service, third-party logistics (3PL) and business process outsourcing business unit providing end-to-end supply chain solutions for the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. To establish a best-of-breed 3PL capable of addressing healthcare manufacturers’ toughest supply chain challenges, they needed a technology partner that offered best-in-class productivity solutions. As a healthcare-focused 3PL, OM HCL would be supporting a diverse client base within healthcare with varying and unique requirements. These varying requirements created a demand for an infrastructure that was more adaptive and more flexible to meet various clients’ needs beyond the capabilities of the current operating system supporting the Owens & Minor core business units.

Doosan Electro-Materials, a Korea-based company specializing in the production of high-quality copper clad laminate (CCL) and flexible copper clad laminate (FCCL), faced significant challenges with its inventory management. The company's large stocks of inventory were inhibiting cash flow, hurting profitability, and creating complex supply chain issues. The fast pace of innovation in the electronics industry, where Doosan operates, leads to rapid component obsolescence, making high inventory levels particularly risky. In 2007, Doosan's management team decided to initiate significant changes to optimize its supply chain processes and implement new demand management and product planning strategies. The company's inventory problems were exacerbated by difficulties with its demand forecasting systems, which could only make a demand plan for the next four weeks.

Ambev, a leading South American brewer and PepsiCo International, Inc.’s bottler outside of the U.S., experienced a significant spike in order volume across its operating regions. This led to the company's decision to search for better transportation solutions that could handle increasingly complex demands from the company’s growing business. In addition to cost and efficiency concerns, Ambev also needed to ensure that customer service levels kept pace with increasing demand. Therefore, the company sought to improve asset utilization and processes while also positioning itself for continued future growth.

Goya Foods, Inc., a global food company with over $1 billion in annual sales, was facing challenges with its supply chain processes. Despite its growth and success, the company was still holding on to a small business mindset and associated supply chain processes that were limiting its growth. Many of Goya’s processes remained manual when they could be automated to achieve greater efficiency. In addition, Goya’s supply chain model and associated technology systems were based on a transactional approach that focused on inventory purchases instead of beginning with consumer demand and an integrated forecasting process. The company was seeing 5 to 6 percent out-of-stock levels due to its enormous product diversity and lack of an integrated demand planning process. Executives wanted to see that measure fall to 2 percent.

Kimberly-Clark, a global leader in the consumer products industry, was seeking ways to improve its transportation management process with the aim of reducing overall freight costs, improving service, and gaining efficiency. The company challenged its business support groups, including transportation, to drive additional savings across the organization. The transportation executives at Kimberly-Clark considered a number of software vendors to solve these challenges before ultimately choosing JDA Software’s Intelligent Fulfillment™ solutions. The company was looking for a solution that could provide the best optimization capabilities to drive the type of freight savings needed in the transportation organization at Kimberly-Clark.

São Paulo Distribuição e Logistica (SPDL), a strategic venture between two of Brazil's largest newspaper groups, O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo, was facing the challenge of continuously optimizing their distribution costs in the face of skyrocketing fuel costs and the proliferation of online news sources. SPDL's transportation network serves more than 900 cities, as well as 700,000 last-mile distribution locations, with 1,250 vehicles traveling more than 100,000 kilometers each day. Despite having a mature operation, SPDL was seeking greater levels of efficiency. They were relying on spreadsheets and manual analysis techniques, and there were no additional savings opportunities that they could identify. They had systematically and thoroughly reviewed every truck route, using the tools they had available.

HEMA, a leading European retailer with approximately 650 stores across the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, was facing challenges in managing its workforce of over 10,000 employees. The company recognized that effective human resources management was critical to its success. HEMA wanted to implement a new workforce management system to optimize labor costs, ensure high customer service levels, and address all operations that characterize a multi-category retail business across all store formats. Another goal was to encourage collaboration and best-practice sharing among employees in different regions. The company conducted a rigorous process to identify the right technology solution, evaluating 12 vendors before making a selection.

ORSAY, a vertically organized fast-fashion retailer, manages the complete supply chain, from design to production and selling. The company offers an up-to-date product range — a large selection of trendy styles and classical looks that customers are looking for right now. Because fashion trends are always changing, ORSAY is challenged to manage the pricing of its products across their life cycle — maximizing profits, but also ensuring that clothing will sell before it becomes outdated. ORSAY’s goals were to increase revenues and margins via fewer markdowns, reduce inventory costs by clearing stock more efficiently, improve staff productivity, and enhance shoppers’ satisfaction by meeting their merchandise and pricing expectations.

ATL, a fast-growing family-owned business offering mission-critical warehousing and logistics solutions to automotive, food and beverage, and packaging companies, among others, was facing challenges with its existing warehousing management system (WMS). The system lacked the flexibility and systematic traceability required to enable growth in the warehousing arm of the business and diversify in new products that required multi-level tracking. With plans to double business size over the next five years, accurate management and control of day-to-day warehouse operations was critical. The company needed a solution that could improve the speed and accuracy of its warehousing and logistics activities.

LG Electronics, a global leader in technology innovation and market leadership, faced a significant challenge in its European logistics network due to exponential growth over the past decade. The company's logistics control was traditionally outsourced to various third-party logistics providers, resulting in limited visibility and control, and a reactive management style. This outsourcing also led to information bottlenecks and dependency on third parties for any innovation in transportation planning. LG Electronics Europe was also relying on an outsourced manual transportation planning system with fixed routing methodologies, which limited its ability to optimize loads, carriers, and overall capacity. As a result, LG was not able to control all costs efficiently. The company sought to consolidate and upgrade its European logistics operations by bringing control in-house, aiming to proactively measure performance and continuously improve in terms of both service and costs.

KappAhl, a leading Nordic retailer, was facing challenges with its allocation system. The company was performing approximately 3,800 allocations per night on two home-grown systems, which were no longer meeting the demand. The former systems were automated but did not allow the company to work at the lower level of detail required to achieve its goals. With 12,000 unique style/color combinations per season across 400 stores in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Poland, KappAhl needed greater flexibility and expanded capabilities to improve sales while maintaining margins.

Federated Co-operatives Limited (FCL) is a unique business model based on partnership and collaboration. The organization is owned by approximately 235 retail members across Western Canada who sell a wide variety of products, from petroleum to home and building supplies as well as groceries, including fresh produce. FCL provides central wholesaling, manufacturing and administrative services to these locally owned retail co-operatives, creating volume and price efficiencies. FCL’s complex supply chain includes four regional distribution centers, a fleet of nearly 400 trailers and tankers, a petroleum refinery, six plants that produce animal feed, and 10 propane distribution branches. As operations research director, Richard Krause is charged with managing the in-bound supply chain at FCL. “We support the end-to-end solutions for ordering, replenishment, maintaining our inventories in our distribution centers, and having product available for our stores’ needs,” Krause explained. “We’re a very unique company in that we’re owned by our stores. That makes customer service a special priority.”

Advance Auto Parts, a leading automotive aftermarket retailer, was facing a shift in its retail segment from do-it-yourself consumers to do-it-for-me commercial customers. This shift placed added pressure on Advance to ensure immediate product availability. The company was already using JDA Software’s solutions for space and category management, as well as replenishment, to manage its nationwide supply chain when it decided to embark on a supply chain transformation project. In 2010, Advance made a strategic decision to expand the role of these solutions, add physical supply chain infrastructure, and incorporate new technology solutions and business processes to optimize its warehouse, workforce, execution and performance management. To increase service and availability over a large geographic area, Advance decided to retrofit its existing distribution centers (DCs), while also constructing a new 550,000 square-foot facility that would provide daily replenishments to stores in a targeted rollout region.

United Facilities, a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, was facing challenges with its warehouse management processes. The company's legacy warehousing system was becoming too expensive to maintain, and it was struggling to provide efficient service and savings for its customers. The company was also dealing with an increase in fractured ordering, where customers place the same orders multiple times a day. This was leading to inefficiencies in the picking process, as workers had to visit the same bays multiple times to pull products for the same orders. Additionally, one of its customers had set an ambitious goal of realizing significant savings over several years.

São Paulo Distribuição e Logistica (SPDL), a strategic venture between two of Brazil's largest newspaper groups, O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo, was facing the challenge of continuously optimizing their distribution costs in the face of skyrocketing fuel costs and the proliferation of online news sources. SPDL's transportation network serves more than 900 cities and 700,000 last-mile distribution locations, with 1,250 vehicles traveling more than 100,000 kilometers each day. Despite having a mature operation, SPDL was seeking greater levels of efficiency. They were relying on spreadsheets and manual analysis techniques, and there were no additional savings opportunities that they could identify. They had systematically and thoroughly reviewed every truck route, using the tools they had available.

Presstalis, a leading media distribution company in France, manages more than 3,600 magazines and newspapers from around the world. The company needed to ensure that these publications are displayed in a way that promotes sales growth across its customers’ retail outlets in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. This was a complex endeavor as media space planning in these countries is often governed by legal restrictions. In France, every publication title can be placed in retail stores and kiosks due to the freedom of press. This results in a vast quantity and diversity of publication titles, meaning Presstalis had to be very efficient in utilizing every inch of available space in retail stores and kiosks.

Pacific Star, a food distributor based in Mexico, faced a complex supply chain challenge. The company had to store and transport over 7,000 products to various customers across a large geographic area. The products fell into three categories - dry, chilled, and frozen, each requiring specific storage conditions. The company also had to consolidate orders and deliveries to keep costs low. The biggest threat to Pacific Star's profitability was shrinkage, which occurred when warehouse stock passed its expiration date. The company aimed to optimize inventory management practices in four warehouses to increase accuracy and productivity, improve service, manage shelf life, and decrease shrinkage.

Oxford University Press (OUP), founded in 1478, publishes around 7,000 new titles every year, in a variety of formats and up to 40 languages. As the largest university press in the world, it has annual sales of 110 million units. OUP operates its own distribution centre, making it one of the few publishers worldwide to not rely on a third-party distributor. From its warehouse in Kettering, the organization dispatches 36,000 orders every month, 70 percent of which are destined for addresses outside of the U.K. To keep up with growth, OUP sought a scalable warehouse control system to replace their outdated technology which severely restricted how the organization operated and made it reliant on a conveyoring system that was complex and costly to maintain.

Owens & Minor, the nation’s leading distributor of medical and surgical supplies to the acute-care market, sought to improve its demand forecasting and replenishment processes. The company aimed to enhance its ability to meet changes in customer demand on time and profitably, while further reducing its capital investments. The company had been using a homegrown purchase order system which was obsolete and had no ability to optimize the actual order. The company also faced challenges in building truckloads and was limited in adding more truckload vendors. The company was running well over its service level goal in aggregate and wanted to meet its service level goal with less inventory.

NII Holdings, a wireless communication leader in Latin America, was facing critical challenges in forecast accuracy, inventory right-sizing, and product obsolescence. The company's planning tool was a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that was prone to errors and time-consuming manual data entry. The company needed to upgrade its forecasting and replenishment solutions and processes to improve efficiency and accuracy. NII operates hundreds of stores under several different retail banners and layouts, from free-standing buildings to mall kiosks. Because its business is based on high-tech products with innovative features, some of the company’s most critical challenges lie in the areas of forecast accuracy, inventory right-sizing and product obsolescence.

Kenco, a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, was facing challenges with one of its healthcare customers who was using outdated warehouse management technology with legacy functionality. The customer needed more control, system-directed productivity gains, and the value-added functionality offered by a best-in-class warehouse management solution. The existing technology solution lacked emergency replenishment functionality, which was interfering with their ability to fill orders rapidly and cost-effectively. The legacy solution could not allocate orders to the pick faces without the full quantity available to fill the order, requiring the last few items of a particular lot to be physically moved out of the pick face so the system would generate a replenishment for a new lot to fill orders.

Avnet, Inc., one of the world’s largest distributors of electronic components, computer products and embedded technology, was facing challenges in leveraging the full potential of Blue Yonder’s forecasting solution. Although the company had been using the solution for several years, it was not utilizing all of its features, leaving potential benefits unrealized. Avnet planners were still doing certain forecasts manually that could be handled automatically by the Blue Yonder solution. Furthermore, Avnet was not capitalizing on opportunities to provide value-added services for customers and to increase revenue.

Staples Canada, the country's largest office products company, was seeking a way to operate their offices more efficiently and affordably. They offer a wide range of office supplies, technology, electronics, and office furniture, as well as business services such as computer repair and maintenance, and copy and print services. With over 15,000 associates at more than 330 stores and at its head office in Richmond Hill, Ontario, the company needed a robust solution to manage their extensive inventory and ensure seamless operations. The challenge was to find a solution that could quickly and seamlessly resolve support issues and processes.

Super Retail Group, a leading leisure retailer in Australia, faced significant supply chain complexity due to its rapid growth through strategic acquisitions. By 2011, the company was managing seven distinct supply chains, spanning from sourcing in Asia to distribution in Australia and New Zealand. The vast geography of Australia added another layer of difficulty, making cost optimization per unit and movement critical. Additionally, the company started adding more soft goods, which have different demand patterns than hard goods. The retailer needed a forecasting and replenishment solution that could handle its geographic difficulty, as well as the stock-keeping unit (SKU) complexity and demand variation across its seven retail brands. To overcome these challenges, Super Retail Group committed to investing more than $50 million in supply chain and inventory management improvements over three years.

Walgreens, the nation's largest drugstore chain with fiscal 2014 sales of $76 billion, serves millions of customers every day. In order to help these shoppers easily find the health, wellness and beauty products they're looking for, Walgreens launched a consumer-centric retailing program back in 2009 to provide localized offerings in its new and remodeled store formats. However, the company faced challenges in managing the vast array of products and ensuring that the right products were available at the right locations. The company needed a solution that could improve planning accuracy and efficiency across the organization.

Tilly's, a leading specialty retailer of West Coast inspired apparel, footwear, and accessories, was looking to leverage JDA Support Services to enable the consistently high performance of JDA Merchandise Management System (MMS) and JDA Allocation. The company wanted to submit and resolve issues quickly via phone or website, ensure uninterrupted performance of planning and allocation processes, access self-service JDA resources — including webinars and KnowledgeBase — to stay current on JDA solutions, and improve knowledge of solution features for better results.

Talbots, a leading multi-channel retailer, was looking to optimize its merchandise assortment across its 540 stores. The retailer was using a 20-year-old system that was not providing the necessary insights and capabilities to meet customers' needs. The legacy system was manually intensive and had limitations that prevented users from allocating packs and loose product together, as well as viewing sales trends. The company needed a new technology that would enable more accurate and meaningful allocations. The goal was to replace the legacy system with advanced allocation technology that optimizes each store’s potential by placing the right merchandise in the right location at the right time.

RONA, the largest Canadian distributor and retailer of hardware, home renovation and gardening products, faced challenges in managing its inventory across its vast distribution network. The company had thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs) and millions of SKU locations in more than 17 distribution centers (DCs), making inventory management a complex task. The process to generate a demand forecast to support inventory management was disjointed, with little automation and many hand-offs. RONA needed to understand more precisely where inventory was needed across its entire distribution network. The company was only looking backward and needed to look ahead and act on the future.

Praxis, one of the largest do-it-yourself (DIY) chain stores in the Netherlands, was facing a daily challenge of employee planning. They needed to find a balance between efficiency, effectiveness, and customer service. With proper planning, they could improve customer service and prevent excess capacity as well as undesirably high workloads. Acknowledging this, Praxis started searching for an advanced planning solution that would ensure getting the right person at the right time in the right place. After extensive market research, Praxis selected JDA Workforce Management, from JDA’s Store Operations solution. This system met Praxis’ functional requirements best. Praxis was also enthusiastic about the user interface and the short implementation time.