Prescriptive Analytics
and Daily Planning

Since opening its first store in 2004, DeFacto has experienced phenomenal growth expanding its geographic footprint to over 11 countries in and around Eastern Europe, Middle-East and North Africa. Anchored by its cutting edge design studio in Barcelona, Spain, DeFacto churns out innovative and trendy clothing/ accessories for men, women, teenagers and children that are high quality and affordable.

Although the company was built around good product design and smart merchandising, DeFacto’s demand and inventory planning functions were entirely managed by the merchandising team through an internally developed replenishment algorithm with data coming from internal legacy systems. With poor support on demand and inventory planning, the merchandising team often relied on Excel and blunt statistical averages to plan inventory, perform pre-season deployments, and replenish stores. They performed allocation decisions without the ability to see the revenue potential across their entire network leading to stock- outs. Rising stocks due to excess ordering or mis-deployed inventory meant store managers increasingly had to adopt aggressive markdowns to clear inventory, resulting in significant gross margin erosions for the company.