Streamlining Supply Chain Inventory Management and Forecasting
Jack in the Box - 1/30/2022
The Challenge
The pandemic has exacerbated supply chain issues across the world. The food industry and Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) were no exception. The QSR Industry has experienced 18-24 week lead times for food, and supply data that changes by the hour.
Jack in the Box, a Quick Service Restaurant with over 2200 locations across the United States, recognized the need to improve their supply chain operations.
Analyzing incoming inventory data was a challenge, along with forecasting inventory changes. This forecasting is critical to assess the risk of shortages of specific items at given locations. There were too many cumbersome and manual steps, taking many human hours to process, oftentimes reducing accuracy.
The Navalia team designed, developed and delivered an application that significantly reduced the time invested in understanding the state of inventory in our supply chain during these unprecedented times. The best practices around the architecture and infrastructure have laid the groundwork for other initiatives at Jack in the Box.
Michael Accord
VP, Architecture & Development, Jack In The Box
The Solution
Navalia partnered with Jack in the Box's supply chain team to create a baseline of their supply chain process today. We then took our findings to design and build a platform that significantly reduced manual effort, increased forecasting accuracy in addition to improving inventory monitoring capabilities. This, in turn, allowed the Supply Chain team to focus on other business tasks.
The platform included a data ingestion framework to pick up the distribution center data feed and analyze them. It also included a web application for dashboarding, running simulations, categorizing, filtering and sorting item details and purchase orders.
The MVP was built and deployed in 4-months, including the analysis of Jack In The Box's existing processes. It was built and deployed with DevOps best practices like CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Static Application Security Testing in the pipeline (SAST), with scope for further expansion.
The system allows Jack in the Box to have a scalable solution which enables the supply chain team to quickly modify the inventory management strategy as the sales environment changes. Additionally, the ability to run “what-if” analysis to effectively manage inventory risk as well as create data driven contingency plans is invaluable.
Dean Gordon
Manager, SVP Supply Chain Services, Jack In The Box
Increased Productivity
The MVP included all pending purchase orders at each Distribution Center to see when additional inventory will be arriving, replacing the current manual search process.
Insightful reporting
View key inventory metrics (e.g. weeks on hand and out-of-stock date) for all products. Organize and view products by category for better visibility into problem categories (e.g. chicken and tacos).
Enhanced forecasting
Automatically adjust day-to-day inventory projections at each Distribution Center by applying future purchase order quantities.
The application has helped increase productivity and cut down on the amount of time we spend manually pulling data and exporting to Excel. Having additional access to purchase order information reduces the amount of data request emails we have to send McLane. The inventory simulator has made it so much more efficient to map out inventory levels and account for variables (like shipment delays) on the fly.
Stephen Wathen
Manager, Supply Chain Program, Jack In The Box
We followed the MVP with quick-win enhancements and improvements including the ability to lookup a purchase order and view all items associated, avoiding accidental cancels or deferrals, monitoring and alerting capabilities with DataDog and OpsGenie and DevOps module standardization for re-use across other Jack initiatives.
Navalia has helped us solve a real business problem delivering real business value. With their project and technical leadership, we were able to iteratively develop a solution giving us even greater visibility into product movement throughout the Jack in the Box supply chain. Because of its flexible architecture, we’ve been able to easily extend the application to address other business needs and opportunities. As the company's technology leader, it is reassuring to have Navalia as a trusted solution delivery partner.
Doug Cook
CTO, Jack In The Box