Kimberly-Clark Licenses TrueDemand Solution for Enterprise-Wide Deployment

Posted April 30, 2007

Roll-out supports Kimberly-Clark’s strategic objectives to increase top-line sales and reduce retail shelf out-of-stocks.

TrueDemand Software, a pioneer in the development of integrated sales and supply chain solutions for retailers and suppliers, today announced that the company has closed an enterprise-wide license deal with Kimberly-Clark, the leading provider of global health and hygiene products, to power their forecasting, replenishment and store operations processes. Kimberly-Clark will leverage the TrueDemand Forecast and Replenishment Manager (FRM) Release 2.1 to improve sales by reducing retail shelf out-of-stocks (OOS) for its global consumer product brands, which include Kleenex, Scott, Huggies, Pull-Ups and Kotex.

TrueDemand’s solution will leverage RFID data to provide Kimberly-Clark with greater insight including: perpetual inventory by retail store and selling floor, a daily forecast by product and store, and OOS root causes and lost sales by product and store and retail DC, with prioritized actions for replenishment analysts, retail partners and field operations teams. As a result, Kimberly-Clark will be able to more accurately predict product availability, inventory, execution and out-of-stock problems at the aggregate level across all stores, as well as at the detailed product-store level, and take the appropriate preventive action. TrueDemand’s unique predictive software will recommend specific replenishment, forecasting and store operations actions that Kimberly-Clark can take to help improve sales and market share. It provides out-of-stock root cause analysis and recommendations for continuous improvement for regular replenishment.

Kimberly-Clark and TrueDemand collaborated on a 2005 study using retailer data that demonstrated that out-of-stocks were about two times greater than previously reported.

“We have successfully confirmed that RFID data can give us visibility to shelf level out-of-stocks and help us to understand the root cause of that out-of-stock. This enables us to identify the appropriate corrective action to take. We expect to use TrueDemand to greatly enhance the tool set of our replenishment analysts” said Mark Jamison, Kimberly-Clark’s VP of Customer Supply Chain.

Throughout 2006, Kimberly-Clark worked closely with TrueDemand to refine the application’s capability, determining that TrueDemand could help the company produce accurate floor inventories and store forecasts while identifying and assigning accurate out-of-stock root causes and recommended preventive actions.

“Kimberly-Clark is a great innovator and leader in the consumer goods market, and we are thrilled to be working with them. We look forward to helping them better fulfill their customer’s needs and improve sales,” said Eric Peters, CEO at TrueDemand.

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