American Eagle Outfitters Transforms its Supply Chain into a Business Enabler
Global retailer American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) chose Coupa to help overhaul its end-to-end supply chain processes, and by doing so, achieved faster shipping times, better management of scarce capacity, and the ability to utilize valuable data to make better decisions in a dynamic environment.
“We wanted to build and deploy a solution in a matter of weeks starting with simple solutions and the Coupa Supply Chain App Studio enabled us to act fast and get it done quickly because we didn't have to worry about all the pipes and distance,” said Guru Pundoor, Vice President of Supply Chain Strategy, Planning, and Execution at AEO.
Leveraging Coupa’s Supply Chain App Studio, AEO quickly launched 10 purpose-built applications that have delivered greater visibility and control over end-to-end supply chain processes. Using the apps it built with Coupa, the company can now more intelligently decide which products to send to which distribution centers, identify unproductive inventory, and optimally allocate stock-keeping units (SKUs).
“We have built apps for critical supply chain functions, such as assortment selection, which identifies what products we should carry at each of our six distribution centers. We’ve also built a labor planning app that helped us to reduce time spent forecasting the people we will need in each function to facilitate customer orders from three days to thirty minutes,” Guru said.
The team’s success proves the value of a purpose-built app architecture and its ability to support organizations in the long term. But it couldn’t have happened without AEO’s existing commitment to improving technology and processes to better serve customers.
The investment in this supply chain app architecture before COVID-19 made a major difference in their ability to quickly respond and react during volatile market conditions.
“When COVID hit we had to condense our three year plan into three months, so getting buy-in across all stakeholders was critical. We achieved that alignment within the supply chain — logistics, distribution, and inventory planning — and with organizational partners like the digital team responsible for E-commerce, the merchant planners, and the technology teams to accelerate our plan.”
Read the American Eagle Outfitters case study to learn more about how the team alleviated all Cyber Monday backlogs in just a few days, sped up labor planning by 97%, and stood up four third-party logistics (3PL) nodes in six months with the right assortment, facilitating regionalization of inventory, and helping deliver products 1.5 days faster to customers.
