Founded in 1946, Silentnight is the UK’s biggest bed manufacturer and an acknowledged superbrand. As the UK’s most trusted sleep brand, Silentnight is dedicated to ensuring that all their customers get a good night sleep.
However, after 15 years of using a legacy planning tool, Silentnight’s employees were losing sleep as they were unable to gain the insights needed to future-proof the business. Particularly with ongoing supply chain disruption, Silentnight knew that they needed a tool that would help teams plan for and mitigate any issues.
“With our current tool there is an abundance of data, but it is a challenge to convert this to decision making information on a timely basis and in a consistent way,” Jasmin Lindo-Clarke, business process and applications consultant at Silentnight Group. There are also intensive manual activities in the planning preparation process which are not efficient. Silentnight want to overcome these issues by revising, standardising, and automating the planning process. Changing the planning platform is an integral part of this business change. Having better processes, the correct tools and clearer insights will assist in achieving business efficiencies which help in the drive to reduce costs”.
Silentnight has chosen to work with Anaplan, experts in delivering planning systems, to leverage the flexible platform and embedded predictive and ‘what if scenario’ capabilities to help monitor and better manage resources and costs, as well as gain better visibility into key business metrics such as profitability.
This will give Silentnight the ability to not only collate data but to analyse and impactfully use the insights. Previously, Silentnight employees struggled to create visualisations of their data, which made it difficult for them to see their impact on the overall net contribution and be forward thinking. On top of this, there was the danger of data inaccuracy as there was no audit trail of changes to spreadsheets, and forecasts took 2-3 hours to compile.
Now, Silentnight can easily and quickly provide initial predictions on what forecasts should be based on historical trends, seasonality, or new growth models. This will allow the business to proactively respond to the business environment rather than reactively. Plus, there is now more collaboration across supply chain, finance, and sales, reducing the likelihood of stock issues.
“Silentnight relies on providing a great service to customers, but it can also be subject to outside forces such as supply chain disruption,” Chris Baker, managing director, EMEA at Anaplan, said. “It is vital, therefore, that the business is using scenario planning and analysis tools to remain agile. When employees are empowered by data to effectively plan and forecast, then companies are able to drive business growth and goals.”
