Planning and forecasting are two integral pillars of a successful business. Given the current business landscape, where customer needs and market trends constantly evolve, companies must plan and forecast to adapt to these changes. As a top planning and forecasting solution provider, RELEX Solutions aims to equip enterprises with flexible and innovative solutions to stay ahead in the game.
RELEX prides itself on following a customer-first approach. Hence, the company understands the need for retailers and consumer goods brands to increase customer satisfaction for better profits, improved sales, and reduced operational costs.
With its world-class unified supply chain and planning solutions and platform, RELEX boosts sales and improves sustainability in various sectors, from retail (convenience, grocery, home furnishing, and specialty retailers) and wholesale and distribution (pharmaceutical, construction, and automation) to consumer packaged goods (ready meals, fresh food, hygiene, and home and living).
RELEX targets four main and common areas of concern for retailers and consumer goods brands: demand planning, merchandising, supply chain, and operations. Furthermore, instead of designing a single solution for each of these concerns, RELEX creates customized strategies catering to companies’ individual needs and demands.
Businesses should have insight and visibility into future demand to improve their planning processes; RELEX’s demand planning software helps companies gain visibility and accurate demand forecasts by automatically collecting the impact of hundreds of demand drivers—from promotions and prices to weather information and event data—to increase forecast accuracy. This platform also automates demand forecasting by transparentizing the machine learning automation process. Companies can use this tool to empower their demand planners to make regular upgrades.
In addition to improving and automating demand forecasting, the demand planning software combats recurring forecasting challenges, such as price fluctuations, and introducing new products, promotions, seasons, and perishable items. It also fulfills online orders from stores and customer backorders to boost forecasting and future inventory planning.
RELEX’s demand planning and planning software also integrates short-term demand sensing and long-term demand forecasting into a single location to meet business goals and planning needs and create strategies eighteen months in advance. It also allows companies to build cross-functional alignment by ensuring enterprises base all decision businesses on a shared vision of future demands across planning processes like supply chain, operations, and merchandising.
We’re seeing a need for retailers to be able to analyze and integrate unprecedented amounts of data across various parts of their business, and we know AI to be a powerful tool for optimizing wider parts of the business. — Mikko Kärkkäinen, Group CEO
The Helsinki-based company believes in reforming merchandising. Its AI-powered, data-driven merchandise planning increases sales and margins while reducing overhead business costs. The merchandising software equips companies with accurate data for better, more confident, and impactful business decisions.
RELEX’s merchandising solution allows enterprises to successfully finish promotions with high availability and zero excess stock by using the promotion planning software to improve planning, fulfillment, and forecasting. The company simplifies markdowns by hitting the right products at the right time and price for maximum discount success, improved margins, and low costs.
Regarding planogram optimization, RELEX maximizes the selling value of every square foot while lowering the dependency on manual work with automated and locally sourced planograms. Similarly, the company uses a unified structure to increase the potential of every square foot for better planning, category management, and store operations. RELEX also oversees assortment planning by increasing profits through accurate analysis to identify the right product combination to generate sales effectively and efficiently.
The planning and forecasting solution provider transforms the supply chain using its AI-powered digital supply chain planning software that increases stock availability while reducing costs across supply chains. By combining autonomous optimization with complete control and flexibility, RELEX ensures an organization’s supply chain adapts to rapidly changing demand and market conditions.
RELEX’s automatic replenishment system helps clients to automate their replenishment and automation processes. The software slashes inventory, out-of-stock items, and food waste, reducing the time spent placing and organizing manual orders. It also takes charge of the supply chain by automating, aligning, and simplifying complex inventory structures to drive 99% availability with less stock.
The company also improves availability and fixes fulfillment costs through its AI-powered omnichannel supply chain and inventory optimization software. Moreover, it enhances the sustainability of fresh retail supply chains by cutting food waste while leveraging maximized freshness, increasing sales, and higher markdowns for perishable goods. This software also enables supply chain collaboration by improving visibility and alignment across the entire supply network.
Finally, RELEX improves operations by eliminating silos. RELEX’s digital twin modeling and AI-driven analytics create cross-functional alignment and optimize inventory usage, capacity, and resources across the entire business. It ensures that an enterprise’s merchandising, supply chain, and operations work effectively to maximize sales.
This software enables timely and efficient collaboration between store staff and central teams for better visibility, availability, productivity, and customer experience. With staffing costs taking up 15% of the reason behind turnover rates, RELEX’s workload forecasting builds a robust framework for accurate labor planning and workforce management. It makes data-driven decisions to ensure enough staff availability to improve sales, reduce costs, and boost employee satisfaction.
RELEX’s software also bridges the gap between planning and executing by streamlining a company’s capacity, resources, and inventory with goals, business models, and sales plans to identify, recognize, and combat challenges before they can affect the business.
With over two decades of experience, RELEX has an extensive portfolio detailing its contribution to improving planning and forecasting processes worldwide. An international convenience store chain performed an internal review and found a flawed ordering process. The store also noticed missing product introductions, signaling the need for increased planogram compliance. The company wanted a vendor that understood its business objectives, offered a scalable, cloud-based platform, and created a user-friendly solution—RELEX checked all the boxes.
RELEX met the company’s requirements within four months. The global store chain implemented RELEX’s solutions to track daily delivery transactions and inventory, generate accurate calculations, and improve visibility into assortment details, delivery schedules, and presentation stocks.