6
Countries
5
DCs
5
Sales channels
87%
User acceptance rate
Bonaventura, a premium leather goods e-tailer, sells across 5 sales channels, including Shopify, Amazon, and Rakuten, and reaches customers in 6 countries through 5 distribution centers. Pre-season planning and buying across that many marketplaces was still running on manual, spreadsheet-based work.
So Bonaventura partnered with Solvoyo to move its pre-season planning onto a single platform with automated forecasting. Users accepted 87% of the platform’s recommendations, and forecast accuracy for top SKUs was 90%.
Manual Spreadsheets Couldn’t Scale Across Marketplaces
Bonaventura planned its pre-season buying in manual spreadsheets, and its growth across multiple marketplaces and regions was outpacing what a spreadsheet-driven process could support. The problems were:
- Human errors from manual work in chaotic spreadsheets
- A scalability challenge for planning across marketplaces and regions
- A heuristic approach to forecasting instead of scientific, data-driven models
- A lack of collaboration between teams
Purchasing and buying decisions at Bonaventura rested on a heuristic, spreadsheet-driven forecast.
A Single Source of Truth for Pre-Season Planning and Buying
Solvoyo combined data from Bonaventura’s different marketplaces into a single source of truth, creating a digital backbone for planning on one platform.
The platform also provided flexible assortment planning for the different sales channels. Automated forecasting replaced the heuristic, spreadsheet-driven approach behind purchasing and buying decisions.
Image recognition-based forecasting was combined with attribute-based forecasting to support pre-season planning and buying decisions, including for new items with no sales history.
87% User Acceptance and 90% Forecast Accuracy on Top SKUs
The new platform improved both the speed of planning and the accuracy behind it:
- 87% user acceptance rate for the platform’s recommendations
- 90% forecast accuracy for top SKUs
- More collaboration across teams, through shared visibility
- Higher planner productivity from integrated planning on one platform
What Does This Mean for You?
Bonaventura’s pre-season planning moved from manual spreadsheets to a single source of truth and automated forecasting. The forecasts also covered new items through image recognition.
If your team plans pre-season purchases in spreadsheets across several channels, this is the change to look at: one source of truth for the channel data, and an automated forecast in place of a heuristic one.
About Company
Bonaventura is a premium leather goods e-tailer selling across 5 channels, including Shopify, Amazon, and Rakuten, to customers in 6 countries through 5 distribution centers.
Achievements
87% user acceptance rate
90% forecast accuracy for top SKUs
Image recognition-based forecasting for new items
Don’t take our word for it
Even though our main goal as an e-commerce retailer was managing growth after we went live, with Solvoyo our inventory turns improved by 61% while our availability increased by 44% and our sales almost doubled.
Using Solvoyo’s Markdown Optimization solution, we now can achieve different business objectives. With an AI/ML predictive life cycle forecasting engine, Solvoyo prevents us from taking unnecessary discounts and thus, minimizing margin lost.
Cash flow in e-commerce is extremely important; the more free cash we generate, the better we operate. It is extremely important for this type of business.The savings run into the tens of millions of dollars.
