Specialty organic retailer ensures supply chain health

Thrive Market is automating critical fulfillment processes.

The membership-based online retailer of organic and non-genetically modified organism (GMO) products has experienced rapid growth in the past few years. To keep up with the pace of growth, Thrive Market needed to improve inventory planning and demand forecasting tasks. Certain internal processes still relied heavily on spreadsheets, or were even manual. Thrive Market needed to automate these processes to free time to focus on more valuable inventory management decisions.

The retailer, which offers free shipment and discount prices for a $60 annual membership fee, is deploying technology from Relex Solutions to integrate and improve its supply chain. The rollout includes modules for demand forecasting, replenishment, allocations, and promotion forecasting.

Thrive Market seeks to ensure that all of its fulfillment centers can support efficient and on-time deliveries. The retailer aims to improve its demand forecasting ability for both non-promoted items and items promoted at daily, weekly or monthly frequency and duration. Because demand for promoted items is usually highly variable, Thrive Market looks to improve operational efficiency and guarantee that products are available when members want them.

 “We are most excited about the opportunity to shift our resources from non-value add activities, like building spreadsheets, to true value-add activities like decision-making and analysis of demand and inventory management,” said Nicolas Yepez, Thrive Market director of supply and demand planning,  “Working with Relex will accelerate our journey toward building a world-class supply chain that creates tangible value for our members.”