Indian paints company, Asian Paints, has transformed its procurement planning by implementing o9 Solutions’ cloud-based, artificial intelligence platform. o9 and Asian Paints partnered to engineer the “Purchaser’s Workbench” platform specifically for the latter’s unique business needs.
The Purchaser’s Workbench provides Asian Paints with advanced exception based coverage monitoring and visibility to potential stockouts, which are determined by intelligent rules that vary by raw material categories. With full visibility into inventory, planners can run what-if scenarios, and determine prescriptive options, such as expediting a purchase order, creating a new purchase requisition, or directing an inter-plant transfer of material. The options selected are communicated back to the ERP system in real time.
Chakri Gottemukkla, CEO and Co-Founder of o9 Solutions, explained, “Like so many other areas of our platform, the Purchaser’s Workbench puts the right information in front of the right people, at the right time, so that they can make smarter decisions faster than ever before. It provides essential decision-management support that ensures adequate coverage of raw materials and facilitates discussions with suppliers.”
Prior to its go-live with Purchaser’s Workbench, Asian Paints implemented the o9 platform for a sales intelligence program that supported more than 1,000 mobile users, as well as a demand planning process that refined statistical forecasts by incorporating market intelligence from the sales people geographically dispersed in the field. Because of this expansion, Asian Paints now has real-time visibility into all of its key data points, sales personnel can have more informed conversations with their dealers, and those personnel are achieving a new level of trust in their market.
