JYSK, a global home furnishing retailer established in Denmark and the third-largest retailer in Europe, operates more than 3.5k stores in more than 30 countries and supplies goods from their distribution centers across Europe. Heine Sort, JYSK’s Flow of Goods Director, sat down to share how RELEX is helping JYSK drive forecast accuracy and streamline planning processes through agile, AI-enabled solutions to better serve their customers.
Transcript
My name is Heine Sort. I’m the Flow of Goods Director of JYSK. I’ve been working with JYSK for 18 years. My job is to make sure that we have the goods ready at the right time at the right spot when the customer wants to buy it, whether they want to buy online or they want to buy from a store.
JYSK is a Danish retail company that focuses on delivering a great Scandinavian offer, especially within the sleeping and living categories. We are running more than 3 1/2 thousand stores in 30 different countries, and we supply the stores from our ten European DCs. By selecting RELEX as a partner, we wanted to achieve 4 things. We wanted to make sure that we had a scalable solution, that we had good user interfaces, a high forecasting quality, and, last but not least, we wanted to introduce machine learning as a component in our demand planning process.
Implementing RELEX has been both challenging and very exciting because the forecast is the foundation of all the planning that we do. Luckily, we’ve been able to man the project with highly skilled people both from our demand planning department and also from our technical team, and they have been met with highly experienced RELEX consultants who have helped us through the process and made sure that we have had a successful implementation.
The greatest achievement that we have had till now with RELEX is that we have gained this capability that we were looking for in a new software. Furthermore, we’ve also started now working exception-based to a much higher extent than what we used to do. However, we have only just started the project, and we expect to achieve much more in the months and the years to come.
Also improving, of course, our forecasting quality and utilizing the new user interfaces and the possibilities to a much higher extent in the future. After the implementation of RELEX, we have benefited from being able to pull in RELEX consultants into our scrum teams to continue to drive customization of the solution in use. In JYSK, we set the bar very high for everything we do, and we also want to be among the best in the world when it comes to demand planning. And therefore, we continue to develop the solution to a very high extent.
And we have just started the journey, as of now. I think there’s been a very good match between the culture of RELEX and the culture of JYSK. Both are relatively young companies that always strive to do things better, and that want to be at the forefront of new technology. It’s also two companies that are both challenging what can actually be done and we do not always take no for an answer.
We want to jump even higher, and I think that’s created very good cooperation between the two companies.
