Attention Shoppers: Kimberly-Clark Keeps Life’s Essentials Readily Available at the Shelf with Microsoft BI Tools

Imagine this: It is six o'clock on a Wednesday evening and the wail of your crying baby as you walk through the door serves as an immediate reminder. You forgot to pick up a box of Huggies on your commute home. The last thing you want to do is head back out, but you trudge to your car and drive to the closest store in search of your family's preferred brand of diaper. You're counting on the trip being a quick one with your baby's size of Huggies in stock and easy to find.

Every minute of every day, similar scenarios play out with consumers around the world seeking out life's essentials from the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. In fact, more than 1.3 billion people rely on Kimberly-Clark for some of the world's most well recognized brands, including Huggies, Kleenex, Scott, Pull-Ups, Kotex,Depends and more. To help ensure that its customers readily find these products on the shelf when they need them most, Kimberly-Clark has adopted business intelligence (BI) solutions from Microsoft Corp.

"The Microsoft business intelligence solution has transformed the way we do business," said Ramón F. Baez, vice president of IT Services and chief information officer at Kimberly-Clark. "The challenges of the economic downturn make it imperative to use information as a competitive advantage, and thanks to Microsoft's BI solution, employees can make faster decisions and leverage mission-critical information to stay one step ahead of our competitors."

The company is using its BI solution to improve manufacturing efficiency and increase business agility while extending visibility into supply chain, inventory and manufacturing performance. In just three months following the launch, Kimberly-Clark realized $10 million in additional revenue by avoiding out of stock scenarios with a major retail customer. By getting new business information in front of leadership more quickly, Kimberly-Clark's BI solution is enabling the kind of decisions that may mean the difference between a satisfied customer reaching for that box of Huggies - or a sale lost to a competitive brand.

For more information about the benefits of Kimberly-Clark's BI deployment and to hear directly from the Kimberly-Clark team, watch the video or review the case study. To read about the announcement, click here.