Project Name: The Supply Chain System. An Inventory Planning , Acquisition & Distribution System

 

Story backdrop and Project Description

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Manicube (now AtWork by Red Door) was a beauty tech Startup founded in 2013 by two HBS graduates. It offered in office beauty services for busy professionals and it leveraged technology (scheduling, booking, payments, other task automation) to acquire scale and streamline logistics.. At the time of the acquisition by Red Door Spa in November 2015, Manicube was successfully operating under a B2B2C model that was serving over 250 corporate clients  and about 50,000 of their employees  across 4 markets. 

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This was one of my biggest and lengthiest projects while at Manicube. Post our Series A round, we focused on process improvement across functions. This was necessary in order to achieve the growth rate that would allow us to meet relevant milestones required by the VC. I was tasked with creating and implementing a system that would streamline supply planning as well as acquisition & distribution logistics. Essentially, a Supply Management System!

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Project Approach:

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RESEARCH:

1. Analyze the current system, understand what was problematic with it, what worked and what did not and most importantly why it did or did not.

2. Research supply chains. 

3. Synthesize research and draw actionable insights that would help with the design of a new system.

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1. For the first 2 years, each of our markets handled it’s own Supply Chain and functioned as its own Warehouse. All the supplies would be ordered by each Operations Manager directly to their office, get inventoried and get distributed to SP’s on an ask basis. The time spent by each OM on these tasks on a weekly basis was about 10-15 hours (25% of their time, a cost of about 20k per person, about 80K across all markets per year). Inventorying packing and distributing the supplies were the most time consuming actions. COGS were not optimized and differed across markets. NPS suffered due to supply chain disruptions ( poor reviews from customers as some services had to be pulled off the menu because of the missing supplies).

The current system was ad hoc and reactive.

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2. What's in a Supply Chain System?