ORI Launches Supply Chain Solution for Global Enterprises

Operational Results Inc., a mature, bootstrapped SaaS (Software as a Service) company based in Alpine, Utah, has launched its demand planning application. The company provides a purpose-built platform for sales and operations planning (S&OP) to large, global enterprises. With a small and dedicated team ORI has grown organically through word-of-mouth, building deep relationships, and putting the client first.

“The big announcement right now is that we have launched demand planning. It had a successful beta phase last summer. We've been piloting it with many of our existing clients who have been happy with it. Very large global food and beverage companies have also been using it, which was a surprise to us. We weren't actually targeting those companies, but it has really opened our eyes to just how effective our planning application has been, and that it even meets the needs of those companies” shared James Barlow, President of Operational Results Inc., when we sat down with him recently.

Barlow explained the company’s history; “We started about 20 years ago as a consulting company, focusing on helping companies balance supply and demand. Working with E&J Gallo Winery of Modesto, California, one of the largest wineries in the world, we found a need for a tool that could support sales and operations planning. We quickly realized that alternatives like Tableau were not specialized enough to meet customer demand, and therefore we wanted to build a tool with different modules that support the process of running your business, both in analytics and data management.”

Gallo's VP of Finance said this about ORI: “Thanks to ORI, we only missed one S&OP cycle during our SAP implementation.”

He continued, “We are significantly faster. A lot of companies cannot get what they need to run S&OP (Sales & Operations Planning) out of Power BI. Of the companies we have worked with, in many cases we have replaced their internal BI (Business Intelligence) teams due to the utility and usability of our tools.”

Although Barlow was not able to share actual names of other clients due to confidentiality reasons, he did state, “We work with one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world, and we’ve been working with them for five years now. They came to us. We went market by market, implementing our tools with them, starting with South America.”

This company, after utilizing ORI’s toolset sent Barlow and the team a note stating “We were able to accomplish in three weeks what we hadn’t been able to do in three years using Tableau.”

This really underscores the point of the work, as Barlow recounts, “We’re trying to solve very specific needs for large supply chain companies that is very difficult for them to do alone.”

Regarding ORI's, Barlow emphasized simplicity. “We love to keep our pricing model as simple as possible. It's a flat fee based on blocks of users. That flat fee includes everything. You get our full suite of modules regardless of current need, and we work with any amount of data regardless of size. We have found a lot of success in keeping it as simple as possible. Due to this and other factors, our churn is extremely low. Most of our clients we have had for many years. Gallo Winery for example, has worked with us for ten years. Our product is used at every level of organizations. We have daily planners that are working at a very granular level while at the same time, everyone up to the CEO is using it,” outlined Barlow.

Barlow said his team is small, but he described it as being critical to ORI's success. “The team itself is only thirteen employees — a combination of just a handful of engineers, a support team of about four to five people, HR, and some other support pieces. So a very, very small team, but we support businesses that are usually billion dollars plus in revenue. About a third of our companies are their using our software in worldwide implementations," said Barlow.

He also said working remotely works well for his team. "The nature of our business has fairly lent itself to remote work so we all just slack and zoom with each other to collaborate.”

Speaking on ORI's growth strategy, Barlow stated, “We have been careful not to grow too quickly. We want to make sure the product is right and our customers are taken care of. We don’t have a sales team, we operate based on word-of-mouth and have a few consulting partners." Most of our companies are in the US but about a third are worldwide implementations so we have seen good growth over the past four years. We're growing between 20-40% year over year. So overall we just have been very customer and product-focused, where all of our money just goes back into our product."

Although not officially announced yet, Barlow talked through the plan to move further into the supply side of things. “Honestly, our entire suite has been shaped by needs of our clients. We look to meet those needs, and then they end up using the tool in a variety of ways we didn't anticipate, and then we embrace that. For example, we built our tool for demand planning, but we have clients now using it for demand and supply planning.”

”We fondly refer to ORI as the 'Gift' because it grants us visibility into a holistic view of our business," Brian Schiegg, CEO of Schwan's Company, a food and beverage customer of ORI's.

Another customer, the world’s leading almond marketer and processor, Blue Diamond Growers of Sacramento, CA said that ORI ... “completely transformed our business planning process and effectiveness in under six months,” according to Blue Diamond's General Manager, Eric Tinson.

ORI plans to focus more heavily on marketing in 2025, with major enhancements coming every three to four months based on client feedback, seeking to meet the ever-changing needs of their large global enterprise customers.

For more information, visit ORI.io