An operating-model-based change approach helped an Italian retail fashion company prepare its organization for a new Planning & Replenishment system, shifting decision-making from subjective judgment toward a more structured, data-driven model.
Challenge
An Italian retail fashion company launched a new Planning & Replenishment initiative to reduce high stock levels while improving product availability across its store network. The new system would automate decisions around purchasing, warehousing and store replenishment, replacing many of the manual and subjective decisions used previously.
However, implementing the technology alone would not be enough. Existing processes, responsibilities and behaviors also needed to change. In particular, informal escalation from stores to senior leadership could influence replenishment decisions outside the formal process, potentially undermining the logic of the new system.
The organization therefore needed to prepare its people to trust the new approach, make decisions differently and adopt clearer roles and ways of working alongside the technology.
Implementation
OXYGY applied an operating-model-based change management approach that looked beyond communication and training to address the processes, organization, competencies and KPIs required for successful adoption.
The work began by mapping the existing Planning & Replenishment processes through interviews with the functions involved. Particular attention was given to handovers, pain points and open issues, helping distinguish challenges that the new system could resolve from those rooted in processes, organizational structures or capabilities. The future-state processes were then assessed together with the system integrator to connect the technological design with the wider organizational changes required.
The team also defined personas for key stakeholder groups, including leadership and commercial teams, to clarify the behaviors, motivations and skills expected under the new model. For leadership, this meant reinforcing the importance of allowing the automated replenishment process to operate without informal intervention. For commercial teams, expectations were defined around how they should interact with stores and respond to feedback within the new way of working.
Targeted communications, skill and versatility assessments, KPI frameworks and a change readiness survey were used to identify adoption gaps and prioritize further actions. The readiness assessment gave the organization a broader view of its ability to absorb the change, extending beyond the teams directly involved in the system implementation.
Achievements
The project reframed the initiative from a software implementation into a broader organizational readiness challenge, surfacing process, governance, capability and stakeholder issues that could otherwise have undermined adoption.
By making expected behaviors and responsibilities explicit, the work strengthened alignment between leadership, headquarters functions and the retail network and reduced the risk of informal interventions overriding the new replenishment logic.
The organization was also equipped with practical tools to support adoption, including process maps, persona-based role expectations, readiness insights, capability assessments and KPI frameworks.
Voices from the project
What I really enjoyed about this project was that it went far beyond implementing a new system. We had to understand how the company actually worked, how decisions were made, and what needed to change around the technology. The fact that the client later asked us to use the same approach on another implementation was, for me, the best confirmation that it worked.
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