Watts is a global leader of quality water solutions for residential, industrial and commercial settings providing multiple brands and products for plumbing and flow control, water quality and rainwater harvesting, drainage solutions and HVAC hot water solutions. Watts has grown both organically and through acquisition. Watts distribution and selling channels are as diverse as their product line. They are continually innovating new products and looking for new applications to improve how water is collected, controlled, and dispersed. Watts sells through retail, wholesale, and direct to large contractors globally. Each channel has unique demand and replenishment requirements.
Watts technology landscape consisted of 24 different ERP solutions as a result of acquisitions. Multiple legacy business processes have been supported through the usage of various shadow IT tools such as MS Excel and different single-user databases to support the unique needs of the various markets they served. With disjointed systems and practices, the demand planning processes have become very labor-intensive, ridged, and took weeks to complete. Data integrity was often called into question. To keep their service levels high, Watts carried large amounts of inventory. As innovation and market changes occurred, some of that inventory became obsolete, causing inventory write-offs and wasted capital investments.
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Watts’ demand planning process has gone from a disintegrated, multiple spreadsheet labor-intensive process to a single integrated solution in Anaplan. The Anaplan solution brings different activities such as new product introduction and product retirement into the demand planning process. This allows planners to think and act strategically as opposed to being data entry clerks. Watts has increased the sophistication of their demand planning practices and has transitioned from Demand Planning to Demand Management. Watts’ an inventory optimization solution coupled with effective supply planning allowed them to reduce working capital investment and improve customer service to many big box home improvement retailers and wholesale distributors.
Watts partnered with Accelytics and Anaplan to standardize and optimize their demand planning processes both technically and functionally. Accelytics created an initial project timeline leveraging Accelytics’ proprietary Accelerated Approach Methodology. This enabled the Watts team to implement a new Demand Planning, Supply Planning and Inventory Optimization solution in a sixteen-week time frame leveraging Anaplan as the catalyst.
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