Planning at 93% Acceptance: How a Mid-Market CPG Automated End-to-End Planning Across 60,000 Service Locations

When your products reach 60,000+ service locations through 75 vendors, and your growth is outpacing your planning process, every spreadsheet becomes a liability. For this $250M mid-market CPG company in North America, demand, inventory, kit production, and component supply were all planned in error-prone Excel — and on-time in-full (OTIF) performance was falling short of target just as the business was scaling fastest.

So the company partnered with Solvoyo to build a single digital platform for end-to-end planning and analytics. The result: planners now accept 93% of the platform’s recommendations without modification — a level of trust in automated decisions that has held steady since 2018 — while OTIF levels improved and the business kept growing without growing its planning team.

7,000+ SKUs, 60,000 Service Locations, and a Planning Process Running on Excel

The company’s planning challenge wasn’t a lack of effort — it was a lack of infrastructure. With 7,000+ active SKUs flowing to 60,000+ service locations, planners were managing demand, inventory, kit production, and component supply across disconnected spreadsheets.

The symptoms showed up everywhere:

• OTIF levels running below target, putting customer commitments at risk
• Stock-outs and excess stock coexisting — the classic signature of planning without optimization
• Inconsistencies in master and transactional data, so every analysis started with a data debate
• Error-prone, Excel-based analysis for demand, inventory, kit production, and component supply
• No corporate memory for diagnostics — when something went wrong, there was no systematic way to learn why

For a business supporting dramatic growth, the manual process wasn’t just inefficient. It was a ceiling on how far the company could scale.

The Company Partnered with Solvoyo for End-to-End Planning

Partnering with Solvoyo, the company rebuilt its planning process as a digital, data-driven workflow on a single intelligent platform.

The transformation began with the digitization step: Master Data Management established consistent, reliable master and transactional data — the foundation every downstream decision depends on. Integration with the company’s 3PL added real-time order tracking, extending visibility beyond the four walls.

Next came the intelligence step. Demand-driven replenishment planning (DDMRP) and inventory optimization replaced intuition-based stock decisions with science — balancing service targets against inventory investment at every echelon. Kit production planning synchronized component supply with finished-kit demand, eliminating one of the most error-prone spreadsheet exercises in the old process.

Finally, the decision automation step: PO management and vendor collaboration turned recommendations into executed orders, with all 75 vendors working from the same numbers on the same platform. Extensive alerts and exceptions let planners manage by exception — intervening where judgment adds value and letting the platform handle the rest.

Planners Accept 93% of Recommendations — and Have Since 2018

The clearest measure of the transformation is the User Acceptance Rate: 93% of the platform’s planning recommendations are accepted by planners without modification — a rate the company has sustained since 2018. That number matters because it captures both sides of automation done right: the platform is accurate enough to trust, and planners stay in control of the decisions that need them.

The broader gains:

• End-to-end planning and visibility on a single digital platform, replacing disconnected spreadsheets
• Improved OTIF levels, protecting customer commitments through dramatic growth
• 3PL integration with real-time order tracking, extending visibility across the external supply chain
• Extensive alerts and exceptions for proactive action instead of reactive firefighting
• High-quality, consistent master and transaction data — analyses now start with answers, not data debates
• Corporate memory for tracking, measuring, and reporting KPIs, so every cycle makes the next one smarter

What Does This Mean for You?

This company’s journey shows that end-to-end planning automation isn’t reserved for the Fortune 100. A $250M mid-market CPG business — with mid-market resources — moved from Excel-based planning to 93% no-touch acceptance by sequencing the work correctly: data foundation first, then planning intelligence, then decision automation with vendors in the loop.

If your planners are still reconciling demand, inventory, and supply across spreadsheets while growth accelerates, the ceiling you’re feeling is the process — not the team.

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