Unlocking Capital, Unleashing Innovation: Workwear Group’s Blueprint for Supply Chain Growth
The Workwear Group enhanced its Demand and Supply Planning platform to target a 10-20% reduction in inventory, automate critical business functions, and deploying a real-time planning platform that powers faster, data-driven decisions, with greater business agility and confidence.
In Brief:
The Workwear Group is a leading provider of custom uniforms to wholesale retailers and major brands across Australia and New Zealand. Its end-to-end supply-chain organisation is made up of more than 150 professionals, including a 30-strong demand and supply planning team, each working to underpin critical service promises of timely and reliable delivery to customers across various industry sectors.
Workwear Group’s CIO Debbie Browning saw an opportunity to build an operational blueprint for planning – a unified integrated solution that could enhance planning and decision-making to fuel Workwear Group’s push into new markets.
Until recently, the team managed planning workflows using a combination of long-standing ERP modules and spreadsheet-based tools. Those systems were dependable and had supported a proud tradition of on-time delivery, though they operated in silos and couldn’t provide a single, real-time view of demand versus supply.
To address those gaps, Debbie championed a move to consolidate disparate processes onto one platform, supporting the company’s strategy to accelerate market-share gains at home and overseas.
Opportunities in the planning environment
In the aftermath of pandemic-era lockdowns and a sudden surge in e-commerce demand, Workwear Group’s planning team found their trusted systems and tools stretched to the limit. Urgent orders from frontline services and wholesale partners arrived with little warning, and manual processes couldn’t keep pace with volatile volumes or shifting customer priorities. Debbie realised that to preserve on-time delivery and capital efficiency, the team needed a single, unified view of demand and supply – one that would let them spot gaps instantly and free up planners for strategic planning instead of data wrangling.
“Legacy systems meant that information essential for making decisions wasn’t readily available,” she recalls, which sometimes led to delayed responses and occasional stock imbalances. Planners experienced at handling spikes in demand found themselves tied up reconciling data, rather than acting on it.
By pinpointing these growing pressures – to accelerate responsiveness, optimise inventory levels and free up planning talent for higher-value analysis – Debbie set the stage for consolidating disparate processes onto a single, live-view planning platform.
Co-creating the blueprint: Design to deployment
Workwear Group’s supply chain transformation began with a rigorous evaluation of cloud-based planning platforms. After narrowing the shortlist, Debbie’s team selected Anaplan for its combination of fit-for-purpose functionality, total cost of ownership and ease of use. From there, Cornerstone stepped in as Workwear Group’s strategic enablement partner, collaborating side-by-side at every turn of the multi-year project.
Cornerstone facilitated a series of co-innovation workshops, during which Workwear Group’s planning experts mapped their unique apparel and footwear workflows and Cornerstone overlaid industry best-practice frameworks to tailor the solution.
Drawing on best practice and insights from automotive, consumer-goods and high-tech manufacturing clients, Cornerstone supported the Workwear team to challenge assumptions and think differently about new strategies for demand shaping and inventory planning optimisation.
“The team at Cornerstone really took the time to understand the nuances of apparel and footwear and helped us reengineer those solutions for our business,” Debbie recalls.
Under Debbie’s sponsorship, small cross-functional pods ran agile build sprints – first prototyping demand-planning models, then extending into inventory planning and supply optimisation models.
“Workwear and Cornerstone collaborated closely from start to finish – we were in lockstep from process mapping to design, to operationalising the solution,” Debbie notes.
Of course, like any change, adoption required trust. Workwear Group’s peer-led approach and visible executive support helped address early concerns and build confidence. Workwear and CPM identified and appointed internal champions to lead peer-to-peer coaching and immersive UAT workshops. Coupled with Debbie’s visible executive sponsorship, this evangelist-driven approach helped drive adoption.
A phased rollout, from co-innovation workshops, agile sprints and user acceptance testing to go-live, blended Cornerstone’s technical guidance with Workwear Group’s domain knowledge.
Today, planners access real-time demand and supply data in one integrated view, allowing them to identify potential stock imbalances earlier, optimise inventory levels with greater confidence and focus on strategic planning over manual tasks.
Benefits and impact
By moving to an integrated Anaplan planning platform, Workwear expects to unlock a 10-20% reduction in inventory levels over a 12–18 month horizon. Early signs point to a noticeable drop in off-system planning activities, with planners now spending significantly less time on manual data maintenance and reconciliation.
Rather than relying on siloed tools or static spreadsheets, the team now works from a single, real-time view of demand and supply. This has enabled a transformation in forecasting capabilities, delivering enhanced statistical forecast profiles. These more reliable demand signals are already supporting more effective inventory stocking decisions and a more informed procurement spend.
As confidence in the reliability of the planning inputs and outputs grows, so too does momentum for broader optimisation. Inventory is flowing more smoothly across the extended supply chain network, and planners are spending more time on strategic analysis and exception management. The shift has improved decision-cycle times and is laying the foundation for continuous improvement as the solution matures.
With operational load lightened and planning visibility improved, the business is now able to reinvest that bandwidth into product innovation and longer-term initiatives – turning planning efficiency into commercial opportunity.
“The new system allows us to put our minds somewhere else and not just in administration,” says Debbie. “Now we’re free to do more creative thinking.”
The pathway forward
With demand and supply planning now fully operational, Debbie and her team are pressing ahead with the next phase of their supply chain roadmap. The immediate priority is rolling out a capability to bring product lifecycle management upstream – centralising design specifications, materials data and change controls to shorten time-to-market and reduce rework.
Parallel to that, the team is finalising a strategy to modernise warehouse operations, ensuring smoother inbound receipts, put-away and order fulfilment. Plans are also in motion to refurbish and reconfigure distribution centres by optimising layouts and automation to handle growing volumes with greater speed and accuracy.
Beyond these technology and facilities projects, Workwear will continue to mature its supply chain function through structured governance and performance-management forums.
By establishing ongoing review cadences, rooted in the lessons learned during this transformation, the team will sustain momentum and ensure each capability builds on the last.
Ultimately, this disciplined approach will turn the planning platform into a true engine for strategic growth, one phase at a time.
Enabling Workwear Group’s supply chain vision
As Workwear Group’s strategic Anaplan enablement partner, Cornerstone delivered tailored expertise and proven frameworks that let Debbie’s team zero in on solution design for their unique workflows.
In a consultative role, from process mapping through to go-live, Cornerstone’s guidance ensured a smooth implementation and laid a solid foundation for Workwear Group’s next growth chapter.
“We knew exactly what we needed, and Cornerstone provided the expertise and guidance to bring our vision to life,” says Debbie. “Their deep understanding of planning platforms, and willingness to share lessons from other industries, meant we could move forward with confidence.”
Find out more about the Workwear Group, visit www.workweargroup.com.au.
Thinking about transforming your supply chain planning? Find out more about Anaplan here or contact our supply chain team to book a discovery session.
