Planning for the Long Run with a Global Footwear Brand
How an iconic retailer replaced spreadsheet chaos with exception-driven planning to keep growing market share
INDUSTRY
RetailOFFERING
Strategic Supply Chain Assessment, Technology Strategy & Vendor Selection, Advanced Planning System (APS) ImplementationTECHNOLOGY
Kinaxis Maestro"Your have reached your limit"
A global running footwear and apparel brand wasn’t standing still. They were rapidly gaining market share by launching new styles, expanding assortments and winning consumers away from competitors.
However, behind this exciting growth, their homegrown, Excel-backed planning function was starting to buckle.
Demand planning was split across EMEA and North America, with 20 planners trying to manage an increasingly impossible puzzle using Excel: Roughly 3,000 SKUs broken down by gender, size and color, forecasted weekly over multiple years. That translated into tens of millions of data points, refreshed over and over again, manually, each month.
Seasonal resets and constant style turnover made the problem worse. Historical demand couldn’t simply be copied forward; it had to be “stitched” across seasons and product lifecycles to be useful. The spreadsheets that had once been “good enough” for a smaller, simpler business were now a clear bottleneck.
The company could feel the gap widening between the pace of its growth and the speed of its planning. To keep gaining market share—and protect service and margins—it needed a new planning engine built for the long run, not just another sprint through the next business planning cycle.
Building a winning planning engine
The company worked with Spinnaker SCA to define their new requirements and run a vendor selection process for a new planning system. Ultimately they selected Kinaxis Maestro as their planning backbone—drawn to its scenario modeling strength, supply-side visibility and enterprise-grade capabilities. From there, our team helped shape that platform to the realities of a seasonal, style-driven footwear and apparel business.
Spinnaker SCA didn’t just turn the system on. We redesigned how planning worked, then configured Maestro to support that operating model—down to the level of style, color, size and season.
- 01 A new gameplan
- 02 Unified planning
- 03 Strategic system configuration
- 04 Exception-based planning
- 05 Muscle memory
New era, new Target Operating Model
Our team started by designing a Target Operating Model that matched the company’s ambition and reality.
We defined clear roles, responsibilities, and decision rights across EMEA, North America, and the Center of Excellence (CoE). Then, we positioned demand planning as a formal, governed step in the S&OP cycle—not a spreadsheet-based exercise happening in the background. Lastly, we standardized language, processes, and KPIs so every region was planning to the same playbook, off one version of the truth.
This re-alignment ensured the new technology would have something solid to support: a clear, intentional way of working across the business.
Moving from siloed spreadsheets to a single, global planning environment
Next, we helped the global retailer escape the gravity of spreadsheets by:
- Migrating planning into a single Kinaxis Maestro environment, replacing a maze of locally maintained files and logic
- Consolidating and rationalizing data structures so planners weren’t rebuilding the same formulas 20 different ways
- Establishing one governed global demand view that both EMEA and North America planners could work from in near real-time
As a result, planners stopped reconciling spreadsheets and started collaborating around shared data.
Teaching the system to think in styles, colors, sizes and seasons
A growth-stage running brand doesn’t behave like a commodity manufacturer. We extended Maestro so it could truly model their business in order to better sense and respond to shifts in demand and supply. Example configurations include:
- Building custom attribute structures to manage style–color–gender–size at the granularity planners needed
- Engineering lifecycle logic for how footwear and apparel behave across launch, growth, peak, and phase-out
- Implementing “season stitching” so the system could connect performance from prior seasons and model generations (e.g., the 2022/2023/2024/2025 versions of a core shoe) into a continuous, usable forecast for what comes next
This was a first-of-its-kind Kinaxis Maestro implementation for global footwear and sportswear—configured to handle the volume and nuance of a high-velocity, seasonal portfolio.
High-impact planning versus problem solving
Once the foundation was in place, we shifted the planners’ day-to-day reality, for the better, by:
- Implementing exception-based management so the system raises the right alerts when sales orders, inventory or demand patterns drift from plan
- Tuning alerts to avoid noise—focusing only on conditions tied directly to key KPIs like revenue, service and inventory health
- Embedding scenario modeling into the S&OP rhythm so leaders could test trade-offs (assortment, pricing, supply constraints) and choose the best path with data they trust
As a result, planners could stop combing through millions of rows of data and start managing a curated set of high-impact exceptions and scenarios.
Building a long-run planning muscle
Finally, we made sure the new planning engine would keep running long after go-live.
Our team delivered an intensive "train-the-trainer" program with the CoE and key planners, followed by guided end-user training.
Additionally, we produced a 500+ page training guide with practical exercises and supporting materials so the company could onboard new team members and sustain proficiency without constant external support.
This helped elevate the existing CoE into a true owner of the solution, capable of iterating and extending the platform as the roadmap evolves.
As a result, the company didn’t just get a new system. It built a stronger, more confident planning organization to go with it.
From overachieving sprinter to marathon-ready contender
Before this transformation, the brand was winning in the marketplace but straining behind the scenes. Their team was pulling off heroic planning efforts—late nights in spreadsheets, manual data stitching, regional workarounds—to keep shelves stocked and runners happy. And it worked… until it didn't.
Sales and market share growth exposed every weakness at once: longer cycle times, stale data, inconsistent views across regions, and rising risk to both service and profitability.
To keep gaining market share, the retailer needed to train differently—with better tools, better processes and a partner who knew how to shave weeks off the cycle without losing control. In the end, their new planning engine did exactly that. It gave the brand the speed, visibility, and consistency to keep growing, not just hang on.
- Reduced planning cycle time from about a month to one week which means planners can respond faster to demand shifts
- Exception-driven planning surfaces the right issues automatically, focusing planners on what matters most
- A unified, global view of demand across EMEA and North America in a single Maestro environment, enabling consistent KPIs and easier decision-making
- Scenario modeling embedded in S&OP trade-offs, helping leadership make confident calls as the brand continues to win market share
- Stronger, self-sufficient Center of Excellence that owns the platform, training, and continuous improvement roadmap, reducing dependency on external teams
- A planning engine that can keep up with market share gains, stocking the right products, in the right places, at the right time
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