The largest specialty nursey retailer in Australia, Baby Bunting implemented RELEX to provide forecasting, replenishment, allocations, and promotion forecasting for Baby Bunting’s 60+ stores across Australia.
In this video, Sarah Serle, General Manager of Merchandise, and Matt Rodda, CIO for Baby Bunting, share the challenges they faced with siloed and manual ordering processes, why they selected RELEX, and the positive benefits they have seen since implementation. For more information about Baby Bunting’s accomplishment with RELEX’s end-to-end demand planning software, read the full case study.
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Sarah Serle:
Baby Bunting is a specialty baby retailer in Australia. It’s the largest in Australia. It has 64 stores, and we serve millions of customers every year. So, in stores, the team spent a significant amount of their time ordering and managing stock, and that wasn’t an effective use of their time. So, we centralized the process with RELEX, and that enabled store teams to focus more on the customer and less on managing inventory.
Matt Rodda:
In order to work out what solution we needed, we went through a process of working out our requirements. We had a planner move full-time onto the project team and went through an RFP process. Through that process, we worked out RELEX had a great solution that would meet our needs. But more importantly, we also worked out that culturally, there’s a good alignment between the two businesses, and we could deal with them well as a partner, work with them well as a partner, and they were focused on our success as well as their own.
One of the unique things in terms of project approach is the RELEX team, in their first workshop, said to us, “What are our KPIs? What do Baby Bunting want to achieve?” And we aligned on those, and they got built into the dashboards from day one. So, the project team were really clear on what they were working towards, and then we could measure ourselves through the project and afterwards.
Sarah Serle:
RELEX helped us, we’ve got a model where we actually order direct to stores into DC and from offshore, and RELEX actually helped us in all of those workstreams.
Matt Rodda:
Yeah. From a project perspective, it was a great result as well. We deployed on time and within budget, which was quite amazing given we were rolling out through COVID. So, the project was going live in March 2020, so exactly when the business was being impacted by COVID, but being able to still continue with the rollout and achieve our benefits.
Sarah Serle:
So, there are a number of benefits, inventory availability improved by 7%, and the value of inventory in like-for-like stores went down by 8%.
Matt Rodda:
Our future goals within Australia is to expand into 100 stores, so a lot of growth in Australia, as well as into New Zealand and potentially other markets. We’re confident that RELEX will grow with us as we expand.
