Boggi Milano started as a small boutique in 1939 to become the fastest growing of premium Italian menswear fashion all over the world.
Paolo Selva, CEO, Boggi Milano: Passion, style, innovation, and quality – these are the pillars of the success of Boggi Milano. We currently have a network of about 200 stores. We operate in 30 countries.
Nowadays, customers expect responsiveness, deep understanding of their personal needs, and consistently excellent service – all of which stress the traditional capability boundaries of supply chain systems.
Paolo Selva: One of the secrets about success has been always listening to the peculiarities of every single and each market.
Fashion is not just about design. Strategic management of the supply chain is how fashion makes or loses money. The backbone of fashion. And artificial intelligence is the next generation of technology to deliver quality and consistency in the supply chain.
Fabrizio Fantini, ToolsGroup VP of Product Strategy: Boggi Milano had developed their supply chain system for well over 20 years in house, but this was not anymore fit for their rapid international growth. Boggi needed a system to adapt to changes in local demand, to predict sales, to customize their offering around the world. In short, they needed a smart supply chain system that could rebalance inventory availability in real time.
The automated demand forecast of Evo Pricing uses unique assets, such as proprietary data from more than 1 billion people in the world, as well as observations of over 100 billion dollars of sales every year. Expert systems and algorithms use this data to allocate the right products to the right stores at the right time, reducing wasted overstock and freeing up faster-selling inventory, while reducing complexity in the supply chain. Building on the Microsoft stack with Azure, SQL Server, and Excel to meet and anticipate customer demand.
Fabrizio Fantini: Evo pricing builds autonomous systems that create value. Specifically, our supply chain solution can predict the demand of nearly any product and service so that we are able to optimize the right volume at the right place at the right time, every single day. And we built it on top of the Microsoft infrastructure that users are already familiar with, so it’s easy to use.
What we do for Boggi specifically is to help them predict how many pieces they will sell every day, for every store, for every size – so at a very, very granular level. And then based on that, we allow them to diversify their offering more, and therefore, have greater inventory efficiency. Essentially, selling more, but with less inventory overall, based on the intuition that every store only needs a more fraction of the overall product range based on its local seasonal demand.
The replenishment solution of Evo Pricing mapped out the potential sales of each location and recommended delivering higher-demand articles from the warehouse to the right stores in the right sizes.
Also, items not selling well in one location could be transferred to another store, transforming dead inventory that risked being wasted into truly profitable sales.
Fabrizio Fantini: Evo Pricing helped Boggi Milano – in just seven weeks increase – its like-for-like sales by 4%, even while reducing inventory level by 12%. Therefore, we increased the inventory efficiency of Boggi Milano. And actually, stores-to-store transfers were even more impactful, increasing sell-through by an order of magnitude (a whole order of magnitude meaning more than ten times improvement when you move something across different stores).
For Boggi Milano, less really ended up being more, solving the traditional conflict between reducing inventory and increasing sales. The Microsoft powered solution of Evo Pricing fulfilled both goals at once. Within just seven weeks, it simplified inventory management, reduced over stock and fragmentation, and eased warehousing and storage issues – all while increasing full-price sell-through and revenues. Now Boggi has a faster more, agile supply chain, enabling better delivery to customer demand every day around the world.
Paolo Selva: We always put a lot of focus on innovation and technology. That’s reason why we have partnered up with Evo that has put AI at the core of its business.
