Douglas Group is Europe’s leading premium beauty platform, offering more than 130,000 beauty and lifestyle products in online shops, the beauty marketplace, and over 2,000 stores. Kathrin Ternes, Director of Demand Forecasting and Order Management for Douglas shares how RELEX has helped them automate and streamline ordering, improve forecast accuracy, reduce overstock, and improve availability to drive sales and serve customers across all channels.
Transcript
My name is Kathrin Ternes. I’m Director for Demand Forecasting and Order Management at the Douglas Group. This means our department is responsible for the replenishment of permanent assortment, and in this function, we work closely together with the category management, with the supply chain teams and with our sales departments, beside other interfaces. Omnichannel experience and to serve our customers is at the heart of our business and strategy.
With the introduction of RELEX, the target was to find a good technology that could serve our group the best way. The idea was also to standardize ordering processes. What we especially wanted to improve was the availability, for sure, helping us also to reduce unneeded overstock. But in the end, the most relevant target is to push the sales and serve our customers.
What we also wanted to achieve is the transparency on our forecasting model to have more insights into how the calculations look like and also to be able to proactively steer the model. And the algorithm.
In our opinion RELEX is a state-of-the-art demand forecasting tool which helped us a lot to standardize the processes and where we also had a way higher increased transparency on the KPIs. The user-friendly surface allows us a smart navigating between a products past and the future demand, and that helps us a lot to better understand the calculation of products.
Our main goal was also that we have everyday full transparency on the forecast accuracy. And this is something we can measure every day within RELEX, and that also helped us to push more into a data-driven way of working and ordering and to achieve a higher share in automatization.
The implementation of RELEX was quite a challenge as we started in the center of the COVID times. Which was, on the one hand, a challenge to set up a proper forecast model, but on the other hand also with the insecurity of the data looking back and also looking forward for the calculations.
Beside that, we also had to face the challenge that we were changing in the supply chain from a CDC structure to a DC set up, which also required to rethink configuration and also requirements that we had to consider for this project.
The collaboration with RELEX was always very honest, open-minded and trustful. We had a way to go together, but we managed it successfully and built up a good relationship on that.
From a business perspective, RELEX helped us so far with the experiences that we made and what we measured in some of the countries, to increase our availability, to reduce stock-outs so that we are able, in the best way, to support sales.
RELEX helped us a lot to automize the processes to enable a data-driven way of working. And also to install this as a way of working within the organization and company. From what we have achieved with RELEX so far, we are now live in several countries, and we added this year the markets France and Spain.
Our plan is now especially to further enhance the RELEX functionalities in the countries and markets that we are live in. And this is also intended to further stabilize and take advantage of the efficiencies of the solution. We are looking forward to further collaborating with RELEX and also to pursue these plans with them.
