Over the last year, we have seen many relatively new and growing companies struggle with growth. Ensuring you do not short shipments or over invest in inventory has increased in complexity, not to mention uncertain and expensive transportation costs. Add in a tight and competitive labor market and now you have serious obstacles to growth. If any of this sounds like your company, you are not alone.
Our Case Study
Recently, Adroit worked with a leading e-commerce company with a global footprint to balance working capital, inventory/service level, and global logistics costs. First, we did a routine root cause analysis and a supply chain map to fully understand the extent of the problems and their location. It is critical to understand how inventory and information flow in a company. All decisions and changes that are made might look good in a silo, but have various implications to different parts of the business. Taking into account total cost is critical.
Some of the key problems we found were:
- High cost of talented labor making it cost prohibitive to bring into the young and growing organization
- High cost of lead technology pushing them to use spreadsheets and non-integrated tools
- The company investing too much in inventory and receiving a poor ROI
Results
We were able to solve this problem leveraging our Planning as a Service methodology, in which we leverage top talent in smaller retainers to make top talent accessible for smaller companies. Find a full background on this solution via our web page under Supply Chain Planning.
In this case study, it allowed demand planning and contracting veterans in their fields to look at the business and make educated and proactive decisions on forecasting, safety stock, and contract negotiations. We quickly delivered a 20% reduction in working capital spend while keeping the same or better service level. As they leveraged their continuous improvement mentality, they were also able to leverage learnings from marketing sales/promotions to increase their effectiveness by 15% in a month over month comparison.
Logistics experts quickly reviewed rates and SLAs to ensure standards were being met while getting additional quotes from competitors. Our team was able to increase on-time delivery to the warehouse by over 40% in just a few months.
How could Planning as a Service drive massive ROIs and improvements in your business? Our real world actions delivered real world results.
