Footwear Brand’s Procurement Process Redesign Improves Order Fulfillment

The client is a global, retail/wholesale footwear brand based in North America, operating multiple channels and varied distribution points. The company had recently implemented a new ERP solution, enabling several significant changes across product/SKU definition, pooled inventory management, and global procurement.

The client now issues purchase orders based on aggregated demand​, as opposed to customer or channel-specific purchase orders. Despite these improvements, the company struggled with a lack of governance on delivery dates and mismatched supply and demand, resulting in difficulty in procuring and fulfilling orders. ​

After working with the brands’ key stakeholders to determine the root causes of the issues, Parker Avery guided the client in developing a new approach to the entire procurement process. Through a series of workshops, Parker Avery facilitated the procurement process redesign and drove stronger collaboration across the company’s channels.

The procurement process redesign establishes a baseline financial plan for each region and channel, which is then translated into a unit demand plan and ultimately a line plan with placeholders. These placeholders contain enough attributes to allow each channel to conceptualize a merchandise assortment for each month of the season. A key difference included in the line plan is the notion of product availability/timing.

The Parker Avery team worked closely with the client’s product development team, who provided guidance while ensuring all markets could create robust assortments to satisfy customer demand.