Wickes

Hardline retailers face several significant pain points, and Wickes is no exception. It faces pressure from rising costs driven by increasingly complex supply chains. This is most noticeable in its fulfillment, as customers want faster delivery and more options, but are not willing to pay extra for them. The retailer is not immune to global supply chain disruptions either, as shipping delays can impact the business, with 30% of its goods imported from overseas. Wickes must control this rising complexity and margin pressure.

Wickes holds a diverse portfolio of products, with each store containing around 10,000 SKUs, and its design and installation team sells a variety of complex SKU arrangements. Wickes also offers a drop-ship service, which adds to the complexity of its portfolio. In total, Wickes has 2.4 million live item locations that need to be managed every week. 

The complexity of managing multiple systems

Wickes needed a modern end-to-end planning solution that could provide a single forecast. One of its previous systems handled only distribution center (DC) replenishment, whilst another in-house-built system covered DC-to-store and vendor-to-store replenishment.  Maintaining multiple systems was very manual-intensive, and Wickes needed one solution to provide an accurate forecast whilst freeing up employee time for strategic planning.

As it evaluated options, Wickes faced another challenge due to its 2021 demerger from its former parent company, Travis Perkins. This meant the retailer had to decommission its systems and build its own IT infrastructure.

While planning for this transition, Wickes also saw a huge spike in demand for its products during the global pandemic, when lockdowns spurred many DIY and home improvement projects. Digital customers almost doubled, and click-and-collect orders grew 450%.

Consumer-centric omni-channel fulfillment  

Wickes implemented the Blue Yonder machine learning (ML)-based forecasting system in 2022 to provide demand projections with calculated business impact and risk, enabling better inventory management and an improved understanding of demand drivers and customer behavior. The solution also automates tasks, increasing planner productivity by freeing them to focus on strategic decision-making and value-add activities.

The Blue Yonder solution provides Wickes with a more accurate view of demand by consolidating and synchronizing demand signals and external variables across retailers’ physical stores and their online channels. 

Improved, touchless forecasting

Over the next few years, Wickes steadily saw greater stability and improvements, resulting in fewer overstocks and better overall stock health. More working stock capital was classed as ‘good stock’, resulting in minimal inventory obsolescence and wastage. 

Wickes has consistently maintained more than 98% live shelf availability, and with Blue Yonder, it can continue to do so while holding much less inventory.

Another significant improvement is the confidence in the ML-based weekly forecasts, which are ‘low-touch forecasts’ and require very little manual intervention or overrides from Wickes’ teams. 

“The forecast literally hits the nail on the head. In terms of touchless, we're broadly there now with our vendor-to-store ordering, with more than 90% approved by our team with minimal intervention. Our DC-to-store ordering replenishment is primarily untouched. If anything, we bring forward demand to reach warehouse capacities. It’s broadly left alone. We use the order review, order optimization for our vendor-to-DC ordering, and it's pretty low touch too,” said Shaw.

Wickes employs 24 supply planners at its Watford headquarters, and all have become much more strategic, having moved away from the day-to-day management of two different systems. “We have improved the daily lives of our supply managers who actually use the forecasting and replenishment tools much more proactively and with long-term strategic planning, instead of managing multiple systems, which is a big benefit to Wickes and our customers.”

Another major benefit of the Blue Yonder forecasting solution is that it is always up to date. Running as a multi-tenant cloud solution on Microsoft Azure, upgrades are applied as soon as they are available.

Fulfillment exceeds expectations

The most significant benefit for Wickes is that it can maintain its high product availability while holding less stock. The use of Blue Yonder has resulted in faster inventory turns and ultimately less stock holding.

With two-thirds of Wickes’ customers starting their journey online, a high proportion of its sales are fulfilled through the store estate via click-and-collect or home delivery. This digital growth has made its stores more productive, and as a result, stock availability planning has become more critical to meet current demand and growth. 

“Being able to plan and fulfill both in our stores and online for our customers has never been more important, and by expanding our relationship with Blue Yonder, we are further investing in our roadmap as a digitally-led home improvement business,” said Shaw. 

Using Blue Yonder, Wickes can evaluate demand scenarios and use prescriptive recommendations to make more accurate decisions, from staging the right inventory through the distribution network to minimizing stock-outs and maximizing inventory turns.

Cognitive options for the future

Most recently, Wickes has evaluated Blue Yonder Cognitive Solutions, which the retailer has considered potentially beneficial in several ways.

Wickes’ D&I business for entire kitchens and bathrooms has a three-month delivery lead time. This is based on a delivery forecast, not a sales or promotional forecast. Wickes needs to know when to replenish the product in the warehouse to meet customer demand. However, Shaw anticipates the future will be even better with a multi-model forecasting approach. 

“I can foresee that a more cognitive-based fulfillment would help Wickes provide a more optimal store replenishment using AI in the future. If we decide to go cognitive, the Blue Yonder Platform also offers significant benefits through its advanced integration capabilities. Currently, we have separate datasets for forecasting and for replenishment. Going cognitive will certainly provide an uplift and better forecasting for sure,” said Shaw.

A future with AI agents 

Wickes has already experimented with several AI agents around data modeling. “I like Blue Yonder’s approach, which has AI agents sitting above the core applications–not requiring a large-scale change. I anticipate significant changes in category management, as planograms can be used more effectively to improve store-friendly picking in the warehouse and to optimize shelf capacities and quantities, which are currently handled manually rather than iteratively. Ideally, this should be an everyday review of all parameters rather than a manual, large-scale effort. I really like how agents could help in that respect, supporting everyday processes,” said Shaw.

True partnership

“Wickes has been using Blue Yonder’s space planning solution and benefiting from their expertise for around 30 years, and I like their heritage. They have some great history in supply chain and are a trusted partner who can work with Wickes into the future to provide us with a complete transformation journey,” said Shaw.