o9 Solutions, a prominent software platform provider specializing in integrated planning and decision-making, has disclosed its commitment to support M&S’ Clothing & Home business in the digital overhaul of its end-to-end planning systems. This initiative aligns with M&S’ strategic shift towards sustainable growth and value creation.
The implementation of o9’s AI-powered platform, Digital Brain, will supersede and modernize M&S’ existing systems covering merchandise planning, sales stock & intake, and range planning. This integration aims to consolidate these functions into a unified platform. Subsequently, phase two will witness the replacement and integration of M&S’ current forecasting and replenishment systems onto the platform.
Over the next three years, the platform rollout is expected to enhance the agility, cohesion, and responsiveness of M&S’ Clothing & Home business, fostering improved adaptability to customer needs and emerging trends.
The selection of o9’s Digital Brain platform stems from its capability to unify essential retail planning capabilities across departments into a single, flexible, and extensible data model powered by o9’s proprietary technology, the Enterprise Knowledge Graph.
The platform will manage a spectrum of planning processes, from Merchandise Financial Planning and Assortment Planning to downstream operations like Forecasting, Allocation, Replenishment, Promotion, and Markdown Optimization, including Supplier Collaboration for capacity and material planning and purchase orders.
Richard Price, Managing Director of Clothing & Home at M&S, “As we reshape for growth, we are investing to modernise and upgrade our systems so we can create greater visibility and collaboration between teams and suppliers, improve planning & availability and enable us to be more tailored and localized with our ranging. By having an end-to-end planning platform, we will be able to better use data and AI to inform decision-making and future planning so we can continue to be more relevant, more often to our customers.”
Chakri Gottemukkala, Co-Founder and CEO of o9 Solutions, expressed excitement saying, “We are thrilled to be partnering with M&S on such a transformational project for the company. We have a unique opportunity to help an iconic brand jump into the future with our next-generation platform as it reshapes for growth.”
M&S, serving 30 million customers annually, boasts a heritage of quality, style, innovation, and value for money. In FY 2022/23, its Clothing & Home division achieved a sales growth of 11.5%, with like-for-like sales up by 11.2%. The recent update on Christmas trading revealed a 4.8% increase in Clothing & Home sales for the retailer.
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