DECATHLON: Sprinting ahead with smarter, data-driven forecasts driving and accelerating sustainable growth
Supply chain planning fit for a sportswear giant
DECATHLON, one of the world’s leading global sports brands, optimized supply chain costs and margins while reducing environmental impact through smarter, data-driven forecasts with the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. Business intelligence combined with advanced planning capabilities proactively helps identify risks and opportunities and streamline decision-making for optimal sales and operations planning.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail | Villeneuve d’Ascq, France | 105,000 employees |
faster delivery of forecasts.
users leveraging the new business intelligence and planning tools.
increase in data quality.
Data and AI Manager, DECATHLON
Optimizing supply chain costs and margins
In the fast-paced world of sports retail, DECATHLON is a giant. Operating more than 1,800 stores around the globe and the creator of a number of brands across various sports, the company is one of the largest sporting goods brands on the planet. Since 1976, the company has been driven by a single mission to make sport accessible for all. This mission guides DECATHLON’s choices and inspires its actions every day. At the heart of DECATHLON’s operations is a vertically integrated business model, which encompasses research and development, production, and supply chain activities. This allows the company to stay ahead by offering high-performing products at competitive prices.
This model empowers DECATHLON with enhanced quality control, cost-efficiency, and accelerated time to market. However, managing its intricate supply chain—spanning raw material suppliers, international warehouses, and a vast retail network—poses significant challenges. With a renewed focus on the fitness of its supply chain, DECATHLON recognized the need for more-precise, data-driven decisions. But DECATHLON’s digital and business teams were finding that legacy tools compounded by downtime and stability issues in the company’s technology stack were making it difficult to deliver the analytics needed.
To mitigate these hurdles, DECATHLON sought to reform its supply-chain planning processes, aiming for enhanced risk and opportunity identification and streamlined decision-making for optimal sales and operations planning. This transformation was vital for not only sustaining competitive advantage but also fulfilling DECATHLON’s overarching mission.
Data and AI Manager, DECATHLON
Strengthening its position through a new level of planning autonomy
Following the strategic decision to adopt an enterprise-wide cloud-first approach, DECATHLON sought to replace its legacy planning tools and processes with more-powerful capabilities in the cloud, embarking on a five-year journey with the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. The company started by employing business intelligence (BI) and analytics capabilities before expanding into predictive planning.
Alexandru Negoescu, data and AI manager at DECATHLON, explains, “Previously, the IT organization was responsible for building reports for end users, which were challenging from a time-to-market perspective. Our existing planning tools interfaced with our on-premises landscape and were prone to stability issues.”
Because building and finessing these analytical solutions was a slow process with multiple iterations, DECATHLON wanted a solution to empower stakeholders to build and generate their own reports to streamline the process.
Its evaluation criteria included advanced planning features and standard integrations into its legacy ecosystem of SAP and third-party systems. DECATHLON’s supply-chain data warehouse was built on the SAP Business Warehouse application powered by SAP HANA and fed by a number of SAP solutions. The ecosystem encompassed ERP, assortment planning, 360-degree inventory availability, forecasting and replenishment, and warehousing applications. It was also crucial for the new planning solution to connect smoothly with third-party systems and data in the wider BI environment.
DECATHLON found what it was looking for in the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, a key capability of the SAP Business Data Cloud solution. SAP Analytics Cloud offers comprehensive BI, analytics, and planning tools—including predictive planning capabilities for users—in one product.
A key factor in DECATHLON’s successful adoption of SAP Analytics Cloud was close collaboration with a customer success partner from the Customer Success organization at SAP. This dedicated partner played a pivotal role from day one by sharing best practices, delivering deep product knowledge, and facilitating connections with experts and product managers. DECATHLON was empowered to effectively deliver on time and with quality, enabling a smooth go-live. In a separate project, DECATHLON implemented the SAP Analytics Cloud solution for planning. This project was focused on end-to-end planning processes for retail suppliers, aiming to pilot and optimize stocks and sales operations globally. DECATHLON’s system architecture is shown in the diagram.
Data and AI Manager, DECATHLON
Speeding decision-making from weeks to days with reporting flexibility
With industrialized storytelling in a self-service environment through SAP Analytics Cloud, long gone are the days of relying on the IT team to create analytical and strategic planning products. Now, a more accurate and centralized planning foundation delivers a new level of planning autonomy to key users that has also accelerated decision-making from weeks to days, allowing a quicker response to business and market dynamics.
Negoescu adds, “Before we implemented SAP Analytics Cloud, time to market for a report was more than 30 days of work. We can now produce the same reporting product in less than a week.”
Empowering key power users to build analytical reports by themselves represented a big shift for the organization, so DECATHLON supported the adoption with comprehensive training on building reports that would allow for optimal consumption. Negoescu comments, “We have roughly 4,300 business users using our solutions, and we’re adding users every day. Some users will focus on BI tasks, others on planning forecasts.”
Provided with the basis for smarter, data-driven forecasts and more-efficient sales and operations planning and decision-making, DECATHLON’s users can now build highly visual stories and dashboards. Negoescu explains, “We provide access to all the information in our data ecosystem so users can connect and consume. Today, if users have a question, they can dig into the data models and stories, and everything is available on their screens in seconds.”
Since the planning solution was fully deployed, the company has built and rolled out three new critical supply-chain-forecast products. They include a supply-chain business plan, range costing, and supply piloting report for merchandise retailers, which are helping the business to plan, monitor, and execute activities from tactical supply planning; define sales objectives; evaluate the right inventory strategy; and even manage supply margins. Each planning product was rolled out to several hundred users.
DECATHLON has also reshaped how it presents commercial data to suppliers, including major international sports apparel brands. Previously, data was simply presented to these partners in a tabular format. Now using SAP Analytics Cloud, DECATHLON has visualized the data, delivering analytical products with graphical information that’s easier for them to consume. The feedback received from consumers and partners has been favorable.
Internal analysis of the value provided by SAP Analytics Cloud estimates it has contributed to creating tens of millions of euros in incremental turnover opportunity. In parallel, the planning solution has contributed to millions of euros in incremental margin opportunities for 2024.
And as an aside, Negoescu comments on another benefit of SAP Analytics Cloud: “Because it’s in the cloud, maintenance, security, and upgrades are all handled by SAP, minimizing the need for DECATHLON to support large maintenance projects for versioning and patching. In the past, to get ready for an upgrade, we’d have to organize a project two to three months in advance. Right now, these upgrades happen smoothly, without the internal team having to plan around them.”
Data and AI Manager, DECATHLON
Getting its data foundation in shape for the future
DECATHLON plans to focus on the adoption of additional planning tools and to continue to improve reports, documentation, and support for more users around the world.
The company is also looking to enhance its data foundation and connectivity so it can implement new data-warehousing use cases in the cloud environment. By continuing the engagement with its customer success partner, DECATHLON plans to consider if the SAP Datasphere solution can be used for data management and improving connectivity with various source systems, in place of SAP Business Warehouse.