Store managers in LUSH, the international cosmetics retailer, used to prepare purchase orders after analyzing the previous year's sales data. They reviewed the numbers bi-weekly throughout the year, and more. Unfortunately, this inability to forecast accurately demand increased the risk of lost sales, lower margins and poor customer service. Moreover, the cumbersome process of filling out purchase order requests reduced the amount of time that store managers could spend on the shop floor.

LUSH needed to forecast product demand by leveraging historical purchasing patterns for any given store for any future date to enable them to reduce the costs of goods sold, increase profit margins, and minimize the amount of leftover stock at each store.

LUSH installed PROPHIX 10, the Performance Management Solution, to provide a demand planning system to measure, analyze and validate corporate strategic plans against actual results. Store purchase orders - based on Prophix's comprehensive analysis of past sales - are now generated automatically, giving store employees and their managers more time to focus on customer service. Also, there are fewer frequent orders and fewer shipments from distribution centres by land and air.

LUSH really have moved from "ordering scared to ordering smart" and now mostly have "the right products to the right place at the right time." Which is what inventory optimization is all about .