Since 1999, Mercado Libre has built Latin America's leading e-commerce and fintech ecosystem. Operating across 18 countries with a complete suite of solutions for buying, selling, advertising, credit, insurance, and payments, they've transformed how millions of people access commerce and financial services.

But managing operations at this scale brought massive planning challenges.

‍

The Challenge

Mercado Libre operated under planning models and organizational dynamics that were no longer fit for its scale.

• Lack of traceability in Inputs & Outputs: No visibility into planning inputs and outputs across teams and cycles
• Numerous manual steps in spreadsheets: Time-consuming manual processes creating inefficiency and potential errors
• Insufficient real-time information analysis: Limited ability to analyze metrics as they happened, hindering decision-making

For a company focused on using world-class technology to create intuitive solutions, their own planning was falling behind their operational ambitions.

The Solution

Mercado Libre implemented Anaplan to transform their end-to-end Commerce planning, allowing demand, supply, and financial planning teams to work on a centralized platform with shared data.

The implementation used a phased approach and agile methodology:

• Connected Planning Foundation: Beginning with connecting demand and finance planning in Anaplan
• Stakeholder Engagement: Prioritizing user engagement by involving key stakeholders from the start
• Big Picture Focus: Instead of solving isolated issues, focusing on connected planning across the organization
• Agile Delivery: Working with the Keyrus team using an agile approach to deliver each phase on time and within budget

‍

The Results

The transformation delivered measurable improvements across their planning operations:

• Collaborative Tool: Built a collaborative tool where each team has its own dashboard for inputting baseline forecast and supporting building blocks
• Increased Decision-Making Speed: Granted ability to quickly compare and analyze key metrics in real time
• Traceability of All Inputs & Outputs: Ability to analyze every iteration in real time and track the numbers entered by each team, within the same cycle and from previous cycles
• Scenario Analysis: Ability to compare between scenarios
• Single Source of Data: Streamlined data connections between areas and processes, linking Commerce plans with detailed P&L

Josefina Petri, Keyrus EPM Principal Consultant, captures the impact:

‍"The greatest achievement of Mercado Libre has been the improvement of communication between the different teams within each site, which has, in turn, enhanced the accuracy of the numbers presented in each cycle."

Mariana Bergmann, Mercado Libre Demand Planning Sr Manager, adds:

"The collaboration between MELI and Keyrus teams ensured a successful Anaplan implementation, meeting our aggressive timeline."