Page 13 - September 2020 Inform

recruits and restructured. The previous Demand Planning team have now been split into two teams to a Demand Team and a Supply Team. The Demand team will be focused on the volume forecast of our base sales to customers, whilst the Supply team will focus on working with Brand Owners to secure stock to meet that demand.
Alex Colmer moved on at the end of August and has been replaced by Rory Da Costa, who will head up a new Demand Planning team of Amy, Tom, Chris and Chris. The Supply team will report into Sean. This includes Alisha, Bronwynne, Ed, Michael and Martin. (Martin is moving over from the Private Label team).
I’d like to welcome Rory, Chris, Chris and Martin into the team, and I’d like to thank Alex for the significant contribution he has made on forecasting and Gazelle readiness in the last year and wish him well for the future.
GAZELLE : Demand Planning & Product Hierarchy
As John has previously briefed, the Demand Planning go live is the third major milestone on our journey with Gazelle.
A significant amount of work has been completed by the team on gathering extra data on each SKU to input to
the new system over the last couple of months. Through July and August, the Demand Planning team have been training on the new IBP (Interactive Business Planning) system, which went live at the end of August. Now they will start to “cleanse” base sales data for all of our sales in readiness for preparing forecasts for 2021 and beyond of base sales volume. They will start
in August and continue through September and October in readiness for Sales teams adding the promotional uplifts and account plans or 2021 from October onwards.
Through a period of increased workload and requests as a result of COVID-19 plus a mini restructure as above, the whole Commercial Ops team has pulled together to make all this go smoothly and on time. I would like to thank Sean for his leadership and the team for all their hard work in making this happen. Similarly, I’d like to thank Jodie for her dedication and diligence in building a new product hierarchy over the last few months bringing it to a successful go live at the start of August.
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