From kibble to clicks: Chewy’s path to the Edelman Award competition

Each year, organizations from around the world compete in the INFORMS Franz Edelman Award competition, demonstrating how advanced analytics and O.R. are solving real problems at massive scale.

In this episode, members of the team from Chewy, the largest online pet retailer and pharmacy in the United States, share how they tackled a challenge that sounds simple on the surface but becomes incredibly complex at scale: replenishment.

Using a science-driven suite of models, supported by a custom engineering platform and continuous analytics monitoring, the team transformed how Chewy manages purchase orders, safety stock, and inventory placement – all while accounting for unreliable data, supply uncertainty, and vendor constraints.

The result? Improved inventory placement, fewer split shipments, shorter shipping distances, and meaningful financial impact in a thin-margin industry.

It sounds simple from a customer perspective, right? You go on the website, place an order, and then that order arrives at your door. And even from the replenishment side, it sounds simple where you just buy products at certain locations. However, to answer this question at Chewy requires coordinating over a hundred thousand SKUs for over 20 fulfillment centers, buying from thousands of vendors, and executing over a half a million customer orders at a daily basis. Where everything is uncertain, customer demand fluctuates, vendor performance is inconsistent, operational constraints changes. And what especially makes it challenging is that all these decisions are interconnected.

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