How retail giant ÏDKIDS achieved 100% adoption and reduced risk with Pigment

At a glance

• Post-COVID supply chain and logistics issues, plus a complex organization structure and huge dataset, meant IDKIDS needed a more flexible approach
• TM1 + Excel created a rigid, hard-to-control model and process that couldn’t scale with the business or address their challenges
• Bringing finance and procurement together in Pigment created great synergy between their processes and data to help reduce risk across the business
• Pigment creates huge time savings, like 92% reduction in time spent to change metrics in the budget, and creating new cost centers 4x faster
• An enthusiastic enablement program meant IDKIDS saw 100% adoption within the teams involved

It’s no secret that the macroeconomic landscape has presented many challenges for retail brands over the last three years. From unexpected inflation levels to supply chain nightmares to a global pandemic, uncertainty is at an all-time high, meaning innovative brands like IDKIDS need the right tooling in order to make decisions and adjust plans swiftly and confidently.

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Flexibility & granularity for a complex retail enterprise

With 1,386 bricks-and-mortar shops, 29 websites, 17 brands and over 6,000 employees in 70 countries, IDKIDS is working with a huge dataset and countless variables. And with 4 new stores opening every week, their growth isn’t slowing down.

IBM TM1 had been built around their processes, but it wasn’t flexible enough for the team to make changes as those processes evolved, and it couldn’t stand up to their ambitious growth goals and granular requirements. Collaboration was also a challenge, meaning much of the planning and budgeting processes ended up happening in Excel.

Because the accounting controllers, procurement controllers and territory owners were using different tooling, the collaboration needed to create the budget, monitor budget vs actuals and manage the procurement process involved sending lots of spreadsheets back and forth. This meant the data was far from real-time, and was indeed stuck at different stages, making analysis challenging and creating risk since their analysis would be less accurate.

Furthermore, their TM1 solution presented limitations that kept IDKIDS from being able to scale these processes. They were unable to filter by cost center, and adding new dimensions was overly complicated (and sometimes not possible in the way they wanted). 

As a result, IDKIDS were on the lookout for a tool that would be more collaborative, more connected and more scalable despite their complex and massive dataset. So when they heard our CEO Romain Niccoli talk about Pigment for the first time, their interest was piqued.

IDKIDS weren’t in the market for another rigid tool that would keep them reliant on the provider to make changes. They wanted to be able to grow and scale their processes and data architecture as the business grows and evolves. They soon saw that Pigment’s flexibility, ease of use and co-build onboarding approach would give them the confidence, autonomy and empowerment they were looking for, in addition to offering a powerful platform for their planning and analysis.

How multidimensionality is fueling their scalability

One of the most important Pigment features for the IDKIDS team is its multidimensional architecture. With a huge dataset and an ever-growing list of dimensions needed to analyze that dataset, the ability to easily add new dimensions and to layer them at will is key to keeping them agile and insightful.

Another one of the key benefits of implementing Pigment was that IDKIDS could have their procurement and finance data in the same place. This data unicity means they’ve been able to not only streamline their processes and create efficiencies, but also make changes easily as the data and business demand it. 

The team was able to recreate the existing structure and processes from TM1 very effectively. They had a strict deadline for this in order to start preparing the annual budget, and they met it with time to spare. They’ve since been able to turn their attention to new functionality they didn’t have before, such as defining scenarios and bringing key business partners into Pigment for collaboration.

Now the IDKIDS team feels fully confident within Pigment, just as they intended from the beginning. The team says the Pigment Academy and Support Team have been instrumental to that, giving them the confidence to operate autonomously within the tool.

92% time savings on budgeting changes

Now that Pigment is in use for both the finance and procurement processes, the team feels they’re able to help drive the business in real-time. This up-to-date, version-controlled view of all the data has been of huge benefit to the business, allowing them to access and share information and generate helpful commentary in a fraction of the time.

Not only is the system faster, but it’s more powerful, too. The granularity is far better than what IDKIDS had in TM1, allowing them to slice and dice the data and drill down at whatever level they need. This also creates data confidence amongst the team and reduces risk in their analysis.

The P&L, which was complicated and time-consuming to build in TM1, is easily done in Pigment. To change revenue goals in the old system would have taken over 3 hours of manual work; that same task takes less than 15 minutes in Pigment, which is a 92% time savings. Creating a new cost center is also much faster:

How IDKIDS drove enthusiastic adoption

The most important key to IDKIDS’s success in Pigment has been the complete adoption of the platform by the finance and procurement teams. And it’s not just the controllers who are using it, either; other business partners are now starting to access and input into Pigment in order to build the budget and keep the actuals up to date. 

IDKIDS have cited the Pigment Academy and other customer resources, as well as their dedicated Customer Experience team at Pigment, as keys to their success. But they have also done an enormous amount of enablement internally, working to identify Pigment champions early on in the process and hosting weekly internal meetings after launch to help Pigment users within the business use the platform confidently and effectively.

They also took great care to understand what the value proposition of Pigment was for each of their user profiles. While the benefit to the controllers was obvious, they clearly articulated the dynamic reporting and insights other stakeholders would benefit from, allowing them to manipulate the data in real-time in order to understand it and make more informed decisions. This in turn made them even more enthusiastic to adopt the new tool.

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What’s next for IDKIDS + Pigment?

With their finance and procurement teams successfully using Pigment, the IDKIDS team is now expanding its scope and involving more teams in the platform. Recognizing the great potential, they are actively exploring new use cases within Pigment to foster synergy among various processes. In addition to finance and procurement, other teams are joining the initiative, embracing the transformative capabilities of the platform.