Trek Cycles Past the Competition
COMPANY: Trek Bicycles
WEBSITE: www.trekbikes.com
INDUSTRY: Consumer Goods
COMPANY TYPE: Privately Held
JOHN GALT SOLUTION: Atlas Planning Platform
Results
- Increased global visibility and flexibility to drive greater insights across regions.
- Established a fully integrated planning process to support global growth.
- Developed a robust S&OP process through improved reporting capabilities.
Company
Trek is one of the largest and most respected bicycle manufacturers in the world, manufacturing and distributing hundreds of different bicycles and related products globally. To optimize this complex supply chain in an efficient and responsible way, Trek relies on more than a dozen distribution centers strategically placed across markets near its manufacturing.
Challenges
Trek manages a large and diverse product line, characterized by frequent turnover and new product introductions. This creates significant challenges as the company builds its plans and sets its strategy.
Adding addition complexity, Trek’s products have regional variations for similar product models to fit the unique needs of the customers in each part of the world as well as regulatory requirements. Planning for unique attributes with a focus on balancing inventory to meet consumer demand has historically been a significant challenge.
Trek’s global supply chain involves lengthy lead times from multiple global suppliers across several manufacturing locations, which further complicated the company’s planning efforts. The company’s legacy solution lacked the ability to scale and support the growing needs of Trek’s combined demand and supply planners.
Solution
To address the challenges, Trek undertook a comprehensive transformation of their demand planning processes and technologies. Trek needed a system that could better support the growing needs of the business, enable the planners to handle their extensive product line, and effectively manage the end-to-end global process. The team identified the system also needed to be intuitive, easy to use to support accelerated adoption across the business.
After a long search, Trek selected the Atlas Planning Platform from John Galt Solutions to address their global supply chain planning needs. One of the key areas for Trek is the ability for Atlas’ data warehouse to deliver the flexibility the team needed to plan their demand at any effective level of grouping, across a broad range of time zones and regions, just to name a couple.
Atlas’ elevated user experience, with a streamlined interface and powerful exception management allows Trek’s planners to focus on the most important products and areas that need attention in support of business goals and objectives. Trek implemented Atlas to six global offices, including 12 major business segments, within its first phase.
Benefits
Atlas delivered value to Trek immediately. The team gained enhanced forecasting capabilities, improved data integration, and real-time visibility into demand trends across regions. More accurate demand forecasts allow the company to more efficiently align production and inventory levels with customer demand.
Trek realized a complete ROI within the first year of its global implementation. Trek significantly improved its S&OP process with greater reporting capabilities, support for the sharing of critical information, cross-functional collaboration, and more data-driven decision making.
Moreover, Trek integrated an entirely new division into its new solution in less than two months, building a planning process where none had existed before and ensuring that enterprise planning would remain integrated.
In the future, Trek plans to expand its John Galt Solutions implementation to include capacity planning, raw material planning at the supplier level, and extended S&OP.
“Atlas has delivered everything we need for our global process, and more.”
Senior Demand Planning Analyst, Trek Bicycle
