One of the largest footwear manufacturers is optimising their production cycle using our AI-powered analytics algorithms. This leading manufacturer boasts an extensive supply chain that spans manufacturing units and depots across multiple states. Specialising in the dynamic fashion industry, they produce a diverse range of over 4600 articles, offering around 250 colour variations and over 19000 SKUs.

Problem

The increasing complexity of managing a vast product range, coupled with expanding machinery and tight production schedules, posed significant challenges for the company. The production planning team faced the challenging task of coordinating the manufacturing of thousands of SKUs, ensuring that the right products were produced in the right quantities to meet market demand.

Traditional production planning methods, heavily reliant on manual calculations and adjustments, were becoming insufficient. The process was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, leading to frequent issues such as overproduction, which resulted in excess inventory, and underproduction, which caused stockouts and missed sales opportunities.

The business partnered with Crux Digits to develop an AI-powered solution that would transform their production planning process in order to address these challenges.

Solution

Crux Digits developed an integrated AI-driven application called SF.AI, which integrates ERP data and market demand analytics parameters with weighted factors. SF.AI recommends daily production plan changes to supervisors, aligning production with demand swiftly and accurately.

Our analytics translator helped the company’s production team adapt and migrate to a system that further automates production planning processes and facilitates tuning and refining them. The new system increases the accuracy of aligning production with demand, resulting in less overproduction and underproduction, and a lower workload for the team. Additionally, the new system has been adapted to fit into a new data architecture that makes production planning much faster and more flexible in general.

Impact

The implementation of SF.AI significantly streamlined the production planning process, reducing manual effort and complexities. This enhanced precision in scheduling led to a substantial reduction in planning time from 8 hours to under 3 minutes. Overall inefficiencies were reduced, and tedious manual planning processes were eliminated, resulting in better alignment of production with market demand.

By leveraging the new AI-powered system, the company achieved:

• Improved Accuracy: Better alignment of production with demand, reducing overproduction and underproduction.
• Increased Efficiency: A significant reduction in the time required for production planning.
• Enhanced Flexibility: The ability to quickly adapt to changing market conditions and new data inputs.
• Reduced Workload: Less manual effort and fewer errors in the production planning process.

These improvements have led to optimised production cycles, reduced financial losses, and a more efficient overall operation.