o9 Extends Partnership with Guitar Center for AI-Powered Merchandise Financial Planning Capabilities
o9, a leading enterprise AI software platform provider for transforming planning and decision-making, announced that Guitar Center, the largest musical instruments, lessons, repairs, and rentals retailer in the U.S., is extending and upgrading its use of o9’s AI-powered Digital Brain platform for advanced Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP).
“For over eight years now, o9 has been a trusted partner of ours”
Guitar Center initially selected the o9 platform in 2016 to address disconnected planning processes, optimize decision-making, and manage sales for both new and existing products across its diverse selling channels. The advanced MFP capabilities of the o9 platform were crucial in helping the company streamline operations and improve efficiency.
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Today, o9’s MFP technology extends across multiple dimensions of Guitar Center’s business, such as brands, categories, inventory segments, vendors, and omnichannel planning. The company leverages the platform’s advanced scenario planning, versioning, real-time consensus planning, and Open-to-Buy management capabilities. With o9, Guitar Center is able to bridge the gap between pre-season targets and in-season performance while benefiting from the ability to plan both top-down and bottom-up in a single platform. The flexibility and scalability of the o9 platform has enabled Guitar Center to eliminate a wide variety of manual tasks, allowing employees to focus on more value-added initiatives. As a result, the company has realized improved gross margins, inventory turns, and increased productivity.
“For over eight years now, o9 has been a trusted partner of ours,” said Remo Puccio, Senior Vice President, Inventory Management, Guitar Center. “One of our immediate goals was to consolidate a vast array of systems and processes into enterprise solutions. o9 was one of the first pioneers to assist us in consolidating our bifurcated stores and e-commerce MFP processes into a singular omnichannel planning process. The MFP implementation with o9 has been credited as one of the most successful implementations we have had, with a friendly, intuitive, and adaptive interface in which the initial model and pilot were built out over a period of 12 weeks.”
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Puccio continued, “With o9, adjustments can be made in both a top-down or bottom-up approach and at any level of the product hierarchy, which gives our team flexibility in working through the planning cycle. The o9 platform provides reliable accessibility and a consistent and timely business process, as well as creates uniformity in how our team handles planning and forecasting. o9’s MFP solution has been an effective tool for us to ‘place our bets’ and drive results in our business, which continues to be one of the most trusted solutions we leverage in our monthly business cycle.”
“Guitar Center realized the benefit of investing in a future-proof enterprise planning platform to support its MFP workflow, eliminating the use of various spreadsheets for planning to drive greater transparency and accountability,” said Chakri Gottemukkala, Co-Founder and CEO, o9. “This frees up its controllers and planners to spend more time making value-add decisions and taking action to execute their plans. It’s been an honor to partner with Guitar Center over the years, and we are excited to be part of its continued success with the extended use of our MFP capabilities.”
