Jazwares, a Berkshire Hathaway company, has become one of the fastest-growing toy manufacturers in the world by managing internationally beloved brands, including its owned Intellectual Property, Squishmallows.
As the company’s Vice President of Integrated Business Planning, Francesca Noh leads the company’s global S&OP processes. Her role includes the critical work of implementing systems to support sustained growth and agility across markets as Jazwares expands its product portfolio.
Before adopting Arkieva, Jazwares relied on spreadsheets and manual processes to manage its forecasts. As demand skyrocketed for the products in their portfolio, their legacy approach couldn’t keep up with the complex planning and real-time decision-making required to optimize their inventory. It was time for a systematic solution, starting with a single source of truth.
Jazwares needed to scale its global operations without losing control or visibility.
- Disconnected data silos slowed important decisions
Their forecasting and inventory management relied on spreadsheets across different
teams, creating data inconsistencies and a delayed understanding of global demand.
- Visibility was limited across the supply chain
Without centralized data, planners couldn’t analyze forecasts against actuals in real
time, making it difficult to efficiently optimize inventory and spot important gaps.
- Inflexible tools hindered their growth
Traditional ERP systems and manual workflows couldn’t flex quickly enough to keep
pace with the changing realities of a global toy business, limiting the company’s agility
in making data-backed decisions.
Arkieva delivered flexible, configurable, and integrated planning solutions.
To overcome these challenges, Jazwares turned to Arkieva’s AI-powered supply chain planning platform. By implementing Arkieva, they replaced fragmented spreadsheets with one centralized system, bridging data across the company’s ERP and Databricks environment for global visibility and collaboration.
How Arkieva helped Jazwares transform its supply chain planning
A Unified Platform for Forecasting and Inventory
Arkieva integrated seamlessly with Jazwares’ systems, creating a single source of truth for global demand and inventory management. Now, the team can manage bottom-up and top-down forecasts across regions, analyzing performance at any level in seconds.
Real-Time Insights and Faster Decision-Making
What once took hours – or even days – now happens in seconds. Teams can instantly visualize demand and supply data, enabling faster, more strategic decisions and reducing time spent reconciling spreadsheets.
Cross-Functional Collaboration and Adoption
Beyond planning and sales, Arkieva’s centralized data now supports brand, product development, and procurement teams as well, so each function can make informed decisions about production schedules, cost negotiations, and purchase order timing.
The Results:
Reducing forecast errors to under 10%
Within the first full year of adoption, Jazwares has achieved far greater forecast accuracy than ever before, now that they’re supported by standardized, transparent forecasting processes.
Accelerated global adoption and agility
Thanks to a flexible, user-friendly interface, teams across the U.S., UK, Canada, and Asia were able to adopt the new Arkieva system quickly, standardizing global S&OP processes and freeing planners to focus on high-value work.
A culture of empowered, data-driven decision making
By giving every department access to reliable, real-time data, Jazwares has cultivated a decision-driven culture that aligns daily operations with strategic goals and empowers the team to scale confidently for future growth.
“Arkieva has provided more than just a great technology
platform. It’s a partnership with a flexible, customer-centric
approach. They meet us where we are, listen to our needs
and help us continuously improve our system.”
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