Former Amazon employee talks forecasting and assortment challenges and RELEX move
Between 2019 and 2021, Sebron H served as Inventory Manager at Amazon.
Nowadays, she’s a Business Consultant | Global KPI Advisor at RELEX Solutions.
And she’s taken to LinkedIn to give an interesting take on how things work at her former employer.
“Early on in my time at Amazon, before anyone knew Amazon Fresh stores were going to roll-out to the market, I sat in a meeting where we discussed our forecasting and assortments,” she said.
“I spent the entire meeting thinking "this would be so much easier if we just had RELEX". So after the meeting I suggested to a handful of our leadership members that we should simply buy RELEX (like all of it, the entire company - not just a few of their product offerings).”
She added: “In hindsight, it's lucky for me we didn't! I spent two years knowing that no fancy in house build would be able to replace the ease and accuracy of RELEX.”
“Eventually, the decision was easy, and I joined the company at the end of 2021. Brag fully intended - my timing was exceptional.”
She went on to discuss “an incredible year”, with highlights including raising €500 million in a funding round led by Blackstone Growth, valuing the company at €5 billion and landing a number of new clients.
She concluded: “I love supply chain. I enjoy the challenge of never knowing what new obstacle the market has waiting around the corner. TikTok trend? Pandemic? Another weird flavour of customer voted Lay's? Turning apples into apple juice before spoilage (anyone else watch Jack Sinclair’s TEDxTalk)?”
“I want everyone to have the opportunity to manage the best supply chain. I want people to spend less time on forecast adjustments and more time exploring their customer buying trends, imagining new product opportunities.”
“I want team members to feel empowered by owning business areas with healthy in-stock levels, low scrap impacts, and the opportunity to utilise open dollars with intention. I want everyone to experience RELEX!”
Responding to the LinkedIn post, supply chain consultant, Brittain Ladd, gave his own experience of working at Amazon.
“I was in a similar situation. The process for identify where to open distribution centres to support Amazon Fresh was needlessly complex,” he said.
“I recommended to buy LLamasoft. That wasn’t approved. I then recommended that we purchase user licences for Supply Chain Guru, the company’s product. That wasn’t approved.”
He continued: “I went ahead and contracted resources from LLamasoft anyway to build network optimisation models. We did more in two months using Supply Chain Guru than the team responsible for opening Amazon Fresh distribution centres could have done in one year.”
“I’m glad things have turned out well for you, Sebron. I think very highly of RELEX.”
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