At Levi's, executives couldn't track where its product was moving in the pipeline—how many pairs of jeans were being manufactured in which factories and how many were sitting in trucks or in distribution centers.

This wouldn't fly with Wal-Mart, a supply chain pioneer that moves products off its shelves faster than any retailer and expects replenishment on time to keep costs down. Levi's needed to both get a handle on how its products were doing in stores and accelerate the speed at which those products moved from import dock to warehouse to retail shelf.

The lack of information available to Levi's executives translated into poor performance even without Wal-Mart. "Before David, we delivered 65 percent of our product on time to customers," Hammann says. Industry gurus call that a poor performance. "Our rate today is 95 percent," Hammann says. That's a healthy bump that could improve sales by 10 percent to 15 percent, according to Marshal Cohen, senior industry analyst of NPD Group's Fashionworld, an apparel and footwear market researcher. Hammann credits improved demand replenishment systems and forecasting technology the company now uses. Additions include a so-called dashboard Bergen developed that sits on executives' desktops and shows how Levi's 501 jeans are doing with, say, Kohl's department stores on a weekly, monthly or annual basis. The dashboard is designed to look like a website and allows executives to click on a specific product to track how it moves from the factory to the distribution centers to the stores. It shows how many pairs of jeans are available at a given time, what the demand is from the stores and whether the company is meeting that demand. "When I first got here I didn't see anything," Hammann says. "Now I can drill down to the product level."

This system, unlike the old one, connects the employees working within the supply chain to the salespeople all the way up to the company's financial office, a change Bergen oversaw. Execs use the dashboard to track trends—such as whether denim shorts are a hot item in a particular geographic area—and to prevent problems. For example, during the third quarter of 2002, when the company started shipping Dockers Stain Defender pants, it expected to sell about 2 million pairs. The dashboard, however, alerted Levi's to that fact that the pants were flying off the shelves and another 500,000 more would be needed to meet demand. Having that information at its fingertips helped the company avoid bungling its inventory, plan in advance and sell more pants, Hammann says. That same sort of information will be crucial to helping replenish Wal-Mart's shelves during the back-to-school season.

Supply Chain Transformation

Bergen says the most challenging part of the technology overhaul was changing from a national distribution system to a regional one. Before, all Levi Strauss 501-style jeans, for example, arrived at stores from four distribution centers in Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada and Arkansas. This wasn't good enough to meet Wal-Mart's demands for rapid-fire replenishment.