Shimano’s North American bicycle business rides with Netstock

Shimano North America Bicycle Inc. improves production and replenishment of 60,000 items and successfully responds to the changing customer demand.

Established in 1961, Shimano North America has grown from a modest office with three people to having multiple distribution centers, sales, and marketing offices. Today in North America, Shimano’s presence has grown to include Shimano North America Holding Inc., Shimano North America Bicycle Inc., Shimano North America Fishing Inc., G. Loomis, ITI, and Pearl Izumi.

Shimano’s North American bicycle business manufactures and distributes thousands of high-end cycling components and accessories using various channels.

The selection process to find the best inventory optimization solution

Shimano formed a selection team consisting of technical and functional members to research and analyze alternative solutions.

The team selected Nestock, cloud-based demand planning software that:

• Offers a full range of forecasting, inventory optimization, financial and operational planning capabilities.
• Can scale to support the large number of items offered by Shimano.
• Has a multi-level planning technology that enables attribute-based planning and product, geographic, and channel dimensions.

Better inventory planning increased responsiveness on Amazon’s marketplace

“It only took about a month to integrate Netstock with our Oracle ERP system, and our planning immediately became more agile,” says Rick Barrosa, Sr. Manager of Supply Chain. “For example, it helped us to respond with precision to the growing importance of Amazon’s marketplace. We were able to make improvements in the way we planned for that channel in the first week. We were amazed at the flexibility and depth of the analysis that we were able to perform. We can easily select the customers that we want to forecast individually. Previously, these types of changes would have required IT prioritization and took much longer to complete. Now, we can add new key customers or channels in no time flat, experiment with alternative hierarchies and roll-ups, and formulate new insights, all without consuming valuable IT resources.”

Improved forecasting ability has optimized inventory levels

“Netstock’s attribute-based planning has helped in other ways as well,” says Barrosa. For example, we are now able to categorize product lifecycles with multiple dimensions, while our ERP system only had a single field for this purpose. The additional attributes have made it much easier for us to plan for new product introductions, extensions, and improvements. Not only has it improved forecast accuracy, but we have been able to leverage the additional product information to prioritize inventory levels, placement, and production timing.”