A New Operating Model
for a Leading Automotive Aftermarket Retailer

Inventory reduction was never the goal. The retailer's goal was to stay in stock, protecting same-day availability and making sure they remained the first call for both DIY customers and professional repair shops.

We reviewed service-level policies, product dimension hierarchies, stocking rules, store segmentation strategies, and replenishment parameters to make sure modernization didn't accidentally destroy the thing that made them successful. Because "best practice" is useless if it sends your customer somewhere else.

With our Supply Chain Maturity Model, we benchmarked current capabilities—giving leadership a clear, visual picture of where they led, where they lagged and where investment would create the most value.

We reviewed end-to-end planning processes, including procurement, forecasting, replenishment, inventory positioning, postponement and distribution flows. And we challenged long-standing assumptions like vehicle registration-based planning models, front-of-store versus back-of-store inventory logic, how new SKUs were forecasted versus established items, and how demand signals drove stocking decisions and more.

With our IBP Process Framework, we defined what a connected, cross-functional planning cadence should look like—one that links demand signals, merchandise planning, supply execution, and financial alignment into a single rhythm.

The goal was to replace fragmented, siloed planning with a structured IBP process that gave leadership one version of the truth and one forum for making trade-off decisions across the entire value chain.

Decades of enhancements had created a patchwork of planning systems, custom integrations and platform dependencies—spanning wholesale, replenishment, assortment optimization, channel clustering, pipeline, corporate order generation and supplier portals—across forecasting, replenishment, WMS, TMS and labor management.

Some of that complexity was necessary. A lot of it wasn't.

Our supply chain system integration experts mapped the full landscape—including the custom code bridging legacy systems—to determine what belonged in core platforms and what had become technical debt dressed up as process.

That work became the foundation for smarter decisions across SCP, WMS, LMS and TMS platforms and would feed directly into future technology selection choices.

Roles and responsibilities had evolved around what the systems could support—not around what the business actually needed.

We evaluated planning ownership, RACIs, organizational structure and decision rights across merchandising, planning, supply chain and distribution.

Beyond structural redesign, we defined IBP process ownership, cadence, and governance—so that planning, merchandising, supply chain, and finance would operate as one connected decision-making body. The revised Target Operating Model didn't just describe who does what. It described how the organization plans, decides and executes as an integrated system—with IBP as the connective tissue.

The question wasn't who does the work today. It was who should own it tomorrow.

The final deliverable was a practical roadmap outlining capability gaps, organizational implications, enabling technologies and modernization priorities across planning, merchandising and distribution.

From the revised Target Operating Model, we derived prioritized product selection requirements across every planning function.

Those requirements became the foundation for a vendor shortlist aligned to the future-state operating model, ensuring that technology evaluation criteria reflected real business priorities and competitive differentiators—not inherited workarounds or demo-driven enthusiasm. This was something leadership could actually use. And it became the blueprint for what came next.