Headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany, METRO is a leading international food wholesaler specializing in serving the needs of hotels, restaurants, caterers (HoReCa), and independent merchants (traders). METRO’s retail network includes over 600 stores in 21 countries. Most of METRO’s stores offer delivery, and the wholesaler also operates its own delivery company to support direct sales. Around the world, METRO has approximately 15 million customers through all of the wholesaler’s channels.
Success Story
METRO
Demand Planning, Fulfillment
Food wholesaler METRO achieves record product availability with Blue Yonder
The company
The business challenge
Product availability is crucial to METRO customers whether delivered or purchased in-store. METRO must maintain healthy stock levels while fully utilizing its inventories, trucks, labor, and other resources— something its existing systems and processes could not manage. With this complexity, METRO needed digital planning solutions to maintain a profitable balance between supply and demand. It also needed to operate a resilient, agile supply chain in the face of changing demand levels, disruptions, and economic trends.
The solution
METRO relies on Blue Yonder supply chain planning solutions—including demand and fulfillment planning—to keep product availability and profit margins high. These intelligent solutions enable METRO to optimally balance ambitious customer service targets with inventory controls and accurate resource planning. The wholesaler has implemented Blue Yonder planning software across 16 countries and achieved record availability levels. Five more countries are to be rolled out the solutions.
“An omni-channel sales model is at the heart of METRO’s business, which creates planning complexity. Blue Yonder demand and fulfillment solutions have upgraded our planning speed, precision, and results across our end-to-end network. We can balance high availability and high customer service with cost controls and strong financial results. Blue Yonder has also improved our resiliency by allowing us to make fast, fact-based decisions when the unexpected occurs.”
–Alexander Stepannikov, Supply Chain Planning & Ordering Domain Owner, METRO Digital.
Achieving 97% product availability
Leading food wholesaler METRO operates a complex supply chain with products sold at physical stores and directly delivered to hotels, restaurants, grocers, and other food-service businesses.
These small- to mid-sized customers depend on timely, in-full deliveries from METRO and high levels of in-store product availability to meet their customers’ needs. This pressures METRO to achieve “just right” inventory levels while supporting fast stock turnovers and avoiding excess inventory investments. Accurate planning is also critical to fully utilize METRO’s trucks, labor, and physical space investments.
METRO rolled out Blue Yonder demand planning and fulfillment planning software across 16 countries to increase its supply chain planning accuracy. This was a significant upgrade from the company’s existing manual processes and legacy software solutions.
“Our intelligent Blue Yonder solutions have been a core enabler of planning optimization at METRO,” says Alexander Stepannikov, Supply Chain Planning & Ordering Domain Owner at METRO Digital. “By relying on advanced digital solutions to ingest data, perform rigorous analysis, and create accurate plans, we can meet our defined customer service targets while respecting stock and capacity planning constraints.” Stepannikov credits the Blue Yonder Services team with architecting the solution footprint and providing hands-on implementation support.
As the Blue Yonder solutions have been implemented across multiple countries and channels, METRO sees that related countries demonstrate, on average, a 1% higher availability with better stock performance right from the moment of implementation. This improvement further evolves along with the planning maturity development in the countries.
The availability of goods is one of the key strategic goals of METRO's core strategy. METRO has the ambition to reach 98% of product availability by 2030. In line with this goal, in the financial year October 2023 - September 2024, METRO’s cumulative availability has grown from 96% to 97%. Today, Blue Yonder planning software manages more than €15bn sales volume. The global blueprint implementation will be rolled out in five more countries.
Increasing resilience with fast, data-driven decisions
Over the last few years, METRO has experienced significant supply chain disruptions such as the global pandemic, war in Ukraine, and the Suez Canal blockage. However, Stepannikov notes that Blue Yonder has successfully helped the company navigate these disruptions.
“We see consistent proof that the Blue Yonder’s supply chain planning blueprint performs better than our former way of working,” says Stepannikov. “Especially during major supply chain challenges, our operations in countries with Blue Yonder software have shown strong resilience and improved supply chain agility. With its intelligent optimization engines, Blue Yonder enables us to consider current data and make the right decision very quickly, no matter what surprises occur.”
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