Major bottled water manufacturer expands to provide VMI services powered by Highspring 

The Challenge

The client already had a Blue Yonder supply chain planning system for corporate demand planning purposes. They embarked on a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) program as a strategic initiative to improve performance to customers and integrate their supply chains through to the retail level. The existing corporate solution was not going to meet their needs for the strategically important VMI initiative. Highspring became engaged with the company when they were looking for a partner that could recommend an appropriate planning solution for the whole VMI process. They also needed to ensure that the IT department wasn’t saddled with managing another provider on top of the planning solution they already had in place for corporate demand planning.

The Solution

Highspring demonstrated and recommended expanding Blue Yonder’s planning solution to meet the daily demand and fulfillment planning requirements. This was coupled with a third-party solution to manage EDI transaction sets and prepare retail-level data for integration to Blue Yonder. 

Our client needed a quick implementation due to expected growth through the strategic program. Highspring’s agile approach coupled to the Toolkit and Core (TM) was the answer to the speed requirements. It was imperative to enable cost effective and scalable flexibility to a variety of different data and business requirements that could come from future customers. The goal was to create a solution that scales and can be configured from a batch, data, and integration perspective such that every new customer did not require a new implementation, rather an onboard and configuration exercise. 

By creating a client solution toolkit with documentation and business requirement assumptions, the client was able to understand estimated new customer requirements fit to the solution and right size cost and investment to drive customer value for each incremental onboard. This included customer specific master data mapping and multi-tenancy within the Blue Yonder solution batch to enable economies of scale while avoiding dependencies across customers. 

Highspring’s Managed Services team then provided the hosting platform along with the data transformation and staging capabilities of store-level data interfaces like EDI and POS data, bringing full-service support to the client and removing the IT load completely from the company. Additionally, after the project started, growth was significantly faster than anticipated and they needed a partner that could flex with project team availability. 

Our Impact

The client implemented a best-in-class planning solution quickly by using our Agile Deployment Methodology. They were also able to integrate their customer’s POS data directly into the platform enabling VMI. This service was technically enabled by Highspring’s hosting services on AWS and provided our client with a strategic platform to reduce inventory and increase margin.  

Additionally, they became a strategic supplier to some of the largest high-volume national retailers including the largest big box multi-category retail store and the largest dollar, quick inventory turn retailer. Our client continues to engage with Highspring for current and future work as the use of the solution expands daily within their organization.