Personal Collection Direct Selling, Inc. is a direct selling company that provides high-quality, affordable, Filipino-made household, personal care, and intimate apparel products. It sells primarily through individual dealers who sell through their personal networks. Personal Collection started in 2003 in a small warehouse with just eight employees and has grown to millions of dealers selling 150 SKUs across 8 product categories. In 2023, it opened its first international business unit in Malaysia, currently has over 650 stores and plans to open an additional 200 new stores in 2025.
- personal-collection
Success Story
Personal Collection
Personal Collection Achieves 99.3% Product Availability with Blue Yonder
24% increase in product availability
99.3% product availability now attained
26% reduction in safety stocks
0
0
The Company
The Business Challenge
Personal Collection faced challenges in distribution planning, compounded by its exceptional growth over recent years. The company struggled to scale quickly to meet market demands. Its reliance on time-consuming and error-prone manual planning processes often took 20 days to plan and execute. The result was just 80% product availability, mismanaged orders, and lost sales. Personal Collection needed a modern, scalable solution to improve demand management and order fulfillment.
The Solution
Personal Collection chose Blue Yonder Demand & Fulfillment and began with the fulfillment part of the business process. This incorporated a materials requirements planning (MRP) engine to help manage all the necessary procurements across its central and regional distribution centers and its own manufacturing plants and contract manufacturers—ultimately optimizing inventory and order replenishment. This project was successfully implemented by Blue Yonder partners GenieX and Smartlinks within nine months.
“Our past over-reliance on manual systems caused us problems with stock-outs and unhappy dealers who could not sell to their full potential. We needed to plan our production and sourcing better according to demand. Now, with the help of Blue Yonder Fulfillment, we’re seeing 99.3% product availability, together with a 26% reduction in safety stocks. We now have happy dealers and more motivated and strategic planners within our team.”
–Abigail Parazo, General Manager, Personal Collection Direct Selling, Inc.
Better fulfillment for omni-channel sales
Personal Collection faced challenges in its demand and supply planning operations.
Its sales are omni-channel, mainly through house-to-house personal canvassing by dealers, in-store purchases, telephone sales, and from trucks or other temporary locations. With millions of dealers across the region—selling to households and collecting products from hundreds of stores to deliver products—placed enormous pressure on managing demand and fulfillment.
Personal Collection also has a complex, multi-echelon sourcing network consisting of several central and regional distribution centers, third-party logistics operations, its own manufacturing plants in Malaysia and the Philippines, and many contract manufacturers overseas—all with varying lead times to manage.
Manual production planning caused 80% product availability
Previously, production planning was manual and siloed, often making the wrong products in the wrong quantities. The inaccuracy of data also impacted production and on-time delivery. This adversely affected product availability—which was as low as 80%—and often caused stock-outs. Personal Collection could not meet market demands in this ‘pull’ model.
In 2022, Personal Collection decided the most significant problem to address first was its supply fulfillment—it needed to get the supply optimized, so the correct products could be in store at the right time.
“Initially, we had to fix our product availability at all costs, so we built inventories and safety stocks to eliminate the damage to our sales. We boosted product availability up to 96% and got happy dealers—but this was not a sustainable model as we were tying up too much working capital in inventory. We needed to optimize our supply chain. Having already deployed the Blue Yonder software at a global pharmaceutical giant in my previous role, I had every faith in its capabilities.”—Abigail Parazo, General Manager, Personal Collection Direct Selling, Inc.
Blue Yonder partners drive project to completion and beyond
To ensure a successful project, Blue Yonder partners GenieX and Smartlinks provided Personal Collection with various services, including data integration, batch frameworks, impact assessments, training, change management, and support services.
Blue Yonder Fulfillment uses MRP, and integrates to NetSuite ERP system, to optimize Personal Collection’s inventory and replenishment planning to create time-phased inventory plans (that now take just five days to complete), respect multiple time horizons (days, weeks, and months) and recognize the network's interdependencies on customer service and inventory investment. This has resulted in 99.3% product availability and a 26% reduction in safety buffer stock which provided an instant and complete return on the investment.
Now that Fulfillment has been fully adopted, the GenieX and Smartlinks team will focus on working with Personal Collection to move from a ‘pull’ to a ‘push’ environment with the implementation of the Blue Yonder Demand solution during 2025. This will provide better knowledge of promotions and forecasts, allowing Personal Collection to be organized centrally rather than driven by the stores.
Better demand forecasting will reduce safety stocks further
Having a more stable and dependable demand signal will help optimize product orders and plan optimum safety stock levels. Ultimately, better demand forecasting is expected to reduce stores’ safety stocks by around three days, which will significantly reduce wastage and improve cash flow.