The Arkieva planning implementation with the North American Lush division creates a common tool for centralizing demand plans, and easy-on-the fly data analysis.
With over 250 locations, the Lush North American division is headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The 21-year old vegetarian and organic hand-made cosmetics company – differentiates itself in the marketplace by focusing on sustainable business practices and products that are manufactured using natural ingredients. The beauty products retailer has been experiencing year-over-year growth in various regions throughout North America. And as such, noticed the need for a robust planning tool that would give the planning team more flexibility, collaboration, and the ability to quickly and easily analyze data.
The Challenge: Outgrowing Excel Calls for a More Robust Demand Planning Solution
- Year-over-year growth presents the need for a more flexible and collaborative demand planning tool
- Manual error-prone Excel sheets making it difficult to maintain data integrity throughout the planning process
- Cumbersome and complex process for updating files that were becoming increasingly large
“The Lush culture is unique. We are committed to delivering fresh, quality products that are sourced ethically and produced using environmentally sustainable and handmade manufacturing practices. This is all aimed at delivering a one-of-a-kind shopping experience. As Lush continues to grow, it was evident that there was the need to implement a planning tool that was efficient and easy-to-use. The Arkieva implementation will provide the Lush planning team with the tools to cumulate and analyze large volumes of data for manufacturing and sales using one unified tool.”
The Selection Journey: ‘Rolling with the Punches’ and Selecting an Agile Solution
While the global cosmetic industry represents one of the fast-growing markets, with an estimated $429.8 billion in 2022 according to Allied Market Research, the industry is also highly competitive and volatile. This makes it critical for cosmetic companies like Lush to create planning processes that are agile and nimble, within a fast-moving industry.
“The cosmetics industry is quite volatile. Most of the products are fast-moving so; you have to ‘roll with the punches.’ Consumers are always looking for the best next thing. For us, agility is important, and it’s difficult to do that in Excel in a timely fashion. The Arkieva tools show great flexibility; our business is growing so quickly; we needed something that can move and evolve with us. From what we’ve seen the Arkieva solution is very powerful!”
“We started out evaluating about 15 vendors, Arkieva understood the manufacturing side of planning which was important to us because we are a manufacturing business. Additionally, Arkieva differentiated itself from other vendors because the company is consistently investing in product enhancement initiatives. The people at Arkieva know their stuff! We asked some hard-hitting questions during the demos about formulas and the logic. All the answers were extremely impressive! We also felt there was a better culture fit compared to other vendors.”
Arkieva Rapid Iterative Implementation Plan
The Solution:
On-The-Fly Reporting – Nothing Like the Good Ol’ Excel Sheets
“One of the most exciting features about Arkieva is the fact that the reporting interface makes it easy to look at information in various ways. Our team has to present several management reports in various ways, the advantage with Arkieva is that we can do anything on the fly— it’s relatively easy to pull information. Mostly these are reports that would have taken a couple of days to generate. It’s a big game-changer for us.”
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Automated Forecasting
Easy forecasting for products at a detailed product level
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Inventory Visibility
Inventory visibility to create optimal inventory levels
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Improved Visibility
Detailed reporting and analytics for improved supply chain visibility
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One Unified Tool
Access to a unified tool and repository for manufacturing and sales planning
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Better Materials Planning
Improved demand planning for materials planning
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Data integration
Data integration and migration from manual spreadsheets
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Financial Planning
Quickly determine how increased demand affects revenue
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Best Practice Training
Training to ensure higher user adoption and process improvement
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