Window treatments company Springs Window Fashions gets a clear look at future sales with a Valizant software program that runs on the Anaplan analytics platform.
Ben Ames has spent 20 years as a journalist since starting out as a daily newspaper reporter in Pennsylvania in 1995. From 1999 forward, he has focused on business and technology reporting for a number of trade journals, beginning when he joined Design News and Modern Materials Handling magazines. Ames is author of the trail guide "Hiking Massachusetts" and is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.
For more than 80 years, Springs Window Fashions has been keeping North America’s windows covered, providing shades, blinds, and residential and commercial window treatments under a variety of brands, including Bali and Graber. The company has grown steadily through the decades thanks to acquisitions, strong sales, and expanded manufacturing capabilities, and today, the Middleton, Wisconsin-based business employs more than 500 people at its corporate location and 9,000 worldwide.
The task of outfitting and decorating windows has also changed over the years; today’s window treatments now span a vast array of styles, colors, textures, dimensions, and functions. And because window styles change frequently—just like fashion trends in the apparel sector—Springs must monitor millions of possible combinations to meet customer demand.
While that wide array of product offerings may make customers happy, it presents a challenge for the company’s supply chain planners, who must ensure that the right materials, products, and labor are available when needed. The planners’ work is complicated by the fact that a significant portion of Springs’ demand is influenced by consumer promotions—a variable that proved tough for its legacy demand-planning system to handle. In the past, demand planners often spent hours using offline analytics and manual entry adjustments to translate forecasts into operational plans.
But as business grew, company leaders realized that the legacy system just wasn’t going to cut it. They needed a solution that would provide more accurate, detailed forecasts to keep the operation running efficiently.
A MATERIAL UPGRADE
To boost its forecasting capabilities, Springs Window Fashions replaced its legacy forecasting solution with a system from Anaplan, a San Francisco-based developer of cloud-based business planning software and operator of a unified platform for modeling and scenario analysis. For help developing a demand-planning system on the platform to fit its specific requirements, Springs turned to Valizant Solutions, a Long Beach, California-based Anaplan partner firm that adapted Anaplan’s real-time calculation engine to run the programs Springs needed.
As a result of the upgrade, Springs now generates its demand plans four times as frequently as before, with 30% better accuracy and far greater detail, Ed Lewis, president and CEO of Valizant, said in a case study posted on Anaplan’s website. “Before this solution, [Springs] had been challenged to build a fresh [forecast] plan in six weeks sometimes. But during the Covid pandemic, the market situation changed every week,” Lewis said. “Now, it can enter the sales history, new product information, [and] changing fabrics and colors, and account for promotions, including the size of discount, competitive pricing, etc.”
The new platform then crunches the data to improve forecasting accuracy and provide more granular detail. “Now, [the planners] don’t have to hedge and order more inventory, since they can trust the forecast. And they can reduce inventory, avoid wasted capacity, and get better revenue planning,” Lewis noted.
Even better, the upgrade process was completed in just six months, Springs leaders said. “Compared [with] other implementations for our exact same business, Valizant Solutions on Anaplan were up and running in a quarter of the time,” Mickey Klicka, Springs Window Fashions’ manager for financial systems, said in the case study. “And the solution delivered is probably three times as complex.”
With Valizant on Anaplan, Springs has now moved from monthly demand-planning reports to a weekly cycle. And the advantages don’t end there. The company says the solution’s benefits extend beyond the demand-planning department to include its manufacturing facilities, purchasing and inventory management groups, and even its material vendors.
Supply chain planning (SCP) leaders working on transformation efforts are focused on two major high-impact technology trends, including composite AI and supply chain data governance, according to a study from Gartner, Inc.
"SCP leaders are in the process of developing transformation roadmaps that will prioritize delivering on advanced decision intelligence and automated decision making," Eva Dawkins, Director Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice, said in a release. "Composite AI, which is the combined application of different AI techniques to improve learning efficiency, will drive the optimization and automation of many planning activities at scale, while supply chain data governance is the foundational key for digital transformation.”
Their pursuit of those roadmaps is often complicated by frequent disruptions and the rapid pace of technological innovation. But Gartner says those leaders can accelerate the realized value of technology investments by facilitating a shift from IT-led to business-led digital leadership, with SCP leaders taking ownership of multidisciplinary teams to advance business operations, channels and products.
“A sound data governance strategy supports advanced technologies, such as composite AI, while also facilitating collaboration throughout the supply chain technology ecosystem,” said Dawkins. “Without attention to data governance, SCP leaders will likely struggle to achieve their expected ROI on key technology investments.”
The British logistics robot vendor Dexory this week said it has raised $80 million in venture funding to support an expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) powered features, grow its global team, and accelerate the deployment of its autonomous robots.
A “significant focus” continues to be on expanding across the U.S. market, where Dexory is live with customers in seven states and last month opened a U.S. headquarters in Nashville. The Series B will also enhance development and production facilities at its UK headquarters, the firm said.
The “series B” funding round was led by DTCP, with participation from Latitude Ventures, Wave-X and Bootstrap Europe, along with existing investors Atomico, Lakestar, Capnamic, and several angels from the logistics industry. With the close of the round, Dexory has now raised $120 million over the past three years.
Dexory says its product, DexoryView, provides real-time visibility across warehouses of any size through its autonomous mobile robots and AI. The rolling bots use sensor and image data and continuous data collection to perform rapid warehouse scans and create digital twins of warehouse spaces, allowing for optimized performance and future scenario simulations.
Originally announced in September, the move will allow Deutsche Bahn to “fully focus on restructuring the rail infrastructure in Germany and providing climate-friendly passenger and freight transport operations in Germany and Europe,” Werner Gatzer, Chairman of the DB Supervisory Board, said in a release.
For its purchase price, DSV gains an organization with around 72,700 employees at over 1,850 locations. The new owner says it plans to investment around one billion euros in coming years to promote additional growth in German operations. Together, DSV and Schenker will have a combined workforce of approximately 147,000 employees in more than 90 countries, earning pro forma revenue of approximately $43.3 billion (based on 2023 numbers), DSV said.
After removing that unit, Deutsche Bahn retains its core business called the “Systemverbund Bahn,” which includes passenger transport activities in Germany, rail freight activities, operational service units, and railroad infrastructure companies. The DB Group, headquartered in Berlin, employs around 340,000 people.
“We have set clear goals to structurally modernize Deutsche Bahn in the areas of infrastructure, operations and profitability and focus on the core business. The proceeds from the sale will significantly reduce DB’s debt and thus make an important contribution to the financial stability of the DB Group. At the same time, DB Schenker will gain a strong strategic owner in DSV,” Deutsche Bahn CEO Richard Lutz said in a release.
Transportation industry veteran Anne Reinke will become president & CEO of trade group the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA) at the end of the year, stepping into the position from her previous post leading third party logistics (3PL) trade group the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), both organizations said today.
Meanwhile, TIA today announced that insider Christopher Burroughs would fill Reinke’s shoes as president & CEO. Burroughs has been with TIA for 13 years, most recently as its vice president of Government Affairs for the past six years, during which time he oversaw all legislative and regulatory efforts before Congress and the federal agencies.
Before her four years leading TIA, Reinke spent two years as Deputy Assistant Secretary with the U.S. Department of Transportation and 16 years with CSX Corporation.
Serious inland flooding and widespread power outages are likely to sweep across Florida and other Southeast states in coming days with the arrival of Hurricane Helene, which is now predicted to make landfall Thursday evening along Florida’s northwest coast as a major hurricane, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
While the most catastrophic landfall impact is expected in the sparsely-population Big Bend area of Florida, it’s not only sea-front cities that are at risk. Since Helene is an “unusually large storm,” its flooding, rainfall, and high winds won’t be limited only to the Gulf Coast, but are expected to travel hundreds of miles inland, the weather service said. Heavy rainfall is expected to begin in the region even before the storm comes ashore, and the wet conditions will continue to move northward into the southern Appalachians region through Friday, dumping storm total rainfall amounts of up to 18 inches. Specifically, the major flood risk includes the urban areas around Tallahassee, metro Atlanta, and western North Carolina.
In addition to its human toll, the storm could exert serious business impacts, according to the supply chain mapping and monitoring firm Resilinc. Those will be largely triggered by significant flooding, which could halt oil operations, force mandatory evacuations, restrict ports, and disrupt air traffic.
While the storm’s track is currently forecast to miss the critical ports of Miami and New Orleans, it could still hurt operations throughout the Southeast agricultural belt, which produces products like soybeans, cotton, peanuts, corn, and tobacco, according to Everstream Analytics.
That widespread footprint could also hinder supply chain and logistics flows along stretches of interstate highways I-10 and I-75 and on regional rail lines operated by Norfolk Southern and CSX. And Hurricane Helene could also likely impact business operations by unleashing power outages, deep flooding, and wind damage in northern Florida portions of Georgia, Everstream Analytics said.
Before the storm had even touched Florida soil, recovery efforts were already being launched by humanitarian aid group the American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN). In a statement on Wednesday, the group said it is urging residents in the storm's path across the Southeast to heed evacuation notices and safety advisories, and reminding members of the logistics community that their post-storm help could be needed soon. The group will continue to update its Disaster Micro-Site with Hurricane Helene resources and with requests for donated logistics assistance, most of which will start arriving within 24 to 72 hours after the storm’s initial landfall, ALAN said.