ALDI SÜD turned 'special buys' into a data-driven inventory engine.

ALDI SÜD's special buys are limited-time promotional products that draw shoppers into the discount store. Because each item is ordered once and sold through, poor ordering either wastes stock or misses sales. The pandemic exposed how fragile the largely manual, decentralized process had become.

The company centralized inventory control and built a suite of optimization and machine-learning models: a multi-period MIP for product allocation, a classifier for store assignment, a rebalancing algorithm, and dynamic-programming models for national inventory. It shifted a key product category to this unified, data-driven pathway.

Rather than excluding people, the project added a smartphone app that lets 50,000 employees weigh in on product selection. The result affected the daily work of about 40,000 employees and produced annual savings of several million euros, while boosting sales by several billion euros across the relevant categories.