An Increasingly Challenging Environment
Because unserved orders usually translate into lost sales that directly impact the bottom line, high customer service levels are critically important to wholesale distributors. But dealing with intermittent or ‘long-tail’ demand is ultimately challenging. They need to serve this demand in the face of seasonality, shorter product life cycles, increasing SKUs counts, obsolescence risk and offshore supplies that create longer, less flexible lead times.
Too often, saddled with inadequate planning systems, wholesalers turn to supply heroics and short-termism without inventory optimization, analytics-based service optimization, or sales and operations planning (S&OP).
They struggle to forecast volatile demand and manage inventory cost effectively.
ToolsGroup addresses the challenge of synchronizing demand and supply by offering an integrated system that includes:
- Demand modelling and machine-learning to address internal and external demand variations such as market trends, seasonal demand profiles and promotion forecasting.
- Probability-based forecasting that assesses the chance of repeat orders by examining order-line data. Rather than aggregate demand, it keeps track of the number of order-lines placed to reach the total quantity.
- Demand collaboration that brings together demand and forecast data from multiple sources in a web-based consensus platform that even measures Forecast Value Added (FVA).
- Inventory optimization that calculates safety stocks and other inventory parameters for an optimal mix across up to millions of SKU-Locations. It also addresses product expiration, substitution and transportation constraints such as minimum order quantities.
- A “single model” approach that guarantees customer service levels across the network via optimal inventory levels.
Our Wholesale Customer Typically Achieve:
- 20-30%Reduction in inventory
- 99%Product availability
ToolsGroup Solutions for Wholesalers:
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Connect E&C
Demand planners at educational wholesaler Connect E&C would trawl through massive spreadsheets of 16,000 active SKUs to plan their unusually seasonal demand with major peaks at the start and end of each school term. The company had no way to assess trade-offs between inventory and customer service levels, resulting in both service-compromising stock-outs and costly overstocks. The problem came into sharp relief after the company started sourcing a growing amount of supply from Asia. Though unit costs were lower, longer lead times and reduced supply chain agility were threatening service levels. The company knew their systems were no longer able to keep up with the demands in a competitive and complex environment.
Connect E&C selected ToolsGroup software for its proven ability to handle long-tail product portfolios and extreme demand volatility. They also wanted the ability to generate a probability-based forecast that could be further refined by taking a large number of market intelligence factors such as new products, promotions and end-of-life information.
Connect E&C’s implementation went live in only three months. Its ability to manage complexity dramatically improved planning effectiveness. Its ability to forecast at the order-line and SKU-Location level made it much easier to set the optimal inventory mix in the warehouse locations. Specific KPI improvements included:
- 98% Service level target achieved
- 10pp Increase in forecast accuracy
Today stock-outs are less than one percent of our total inventory and this is purely due to situations beyond our control. Crucially, we now have the intelligence to proactively identify potential stock-outs up to four months in advance. This gives us enough time to respond, ensuring we supply customers where the needs are most urgent.
Joseph Ludorf, Executive Director Supply Chain, Cipla