Because Wholesale Inventory is Broken
Intermittent demand. Large, sudden changes in sales and lead times. Your ERP struggles to manage these, and that’s not your fault.
Reduce stockouts and dead stock, without the need for a costly new software implementation.
These are your inventory blind spots.
Unpredictable demand
Challenge
You rely on your ERP to help you manage inventory, and that works fairly well for high-demand, predictable SKUs. But did you know that your ERP does not effectively manage low-selling SKUs that only move a handful per year? These SKUs cause up to 90% of your dead stock.
Over time, many slow-moving SKUs stop selling altogether, turning into dead stock and lowering your inventory turns.
Solution
We have the AI technology, Thermostock, to help you monitor recent sales activity for every SKU – not just high-volume SKUs. It automatically optimizes the stocking levels of all of them for peak profitability.
The return? Our data shows we can reduce dead stock by 46% in as quickly as four months.
Large changes in demand and supply
Challenge
The buying quantities and stocking levels in your purchasing systems are only as good as your forecasts. When large changes occur in sales – up or down – it takes your purchasing system 4-6 months to adjust to the new level of sales, resulting in lost sales or unneeded inventory. Sound familiar?
Solution
Four to six months is far too long, so we created an AI technology, Tiltmeter, to monitor the sale of each SKU to sense when an unprecedented change has occurred. It notifies your operations and buying teams that your purchasing system might need to be adjusted, allowing for faster response (1-2 months instead of 4-6) and decreasing stockouts and dead stock.
Tiltmeter also addresses a drastic change in supply by detecting when a key supplier is shipping much later or faster than normal. It sends a revised lead-time number to help ensure you have what you need in stock, while automatically adjusting the lead time in your ERP.
“The idea of something being set automatically and the ability to have Thermostock update regularly is very attractive. We've seen the results that it does a better job of keeping track of those C & D items than Eclipse is doing."
"For our transfer fill rates, we set our goal to equal or greater than 80%. Before Thermostock, it was lower than that regularly. But now, we are consistently at an 88% on our transfer fill rate."
“Twelve months ago, we had a ton of dead stock on our D & E low-selling items. In the last 12 months, we saw a decrease of 78.5% in dead stock on our D & E items. Thermostock is very important. "
Most of the stuff you sell isn’t forecastable, and ERPs are designed with the assumption that each SKU sells at least 20 times per year. The reality is that 75% of a wholesaler's SKUs sell less than 10 times per year.
Relying on your ERP purchasing alone is costing wholesale distributors millions annually. Let's change that together.
Average dead stock reduction with our technology in four months
The average improvement on your fill rates for your low-selling parts
Monthly data records analyzed per client
Average dead stock reduction in 12 months.
Average points improvement on fill rates for your low-selling parts.
Total monthly data records analyzed per client.
Automatically identify and optimize unpredictable demand from low-selling SKU inventory.
Quickly detect inventory problems leading to stockouts and dead stock by increasing the speed at which your purchasing system reacts to demand and supply changes.
No risk. Low cost. Short start-up time.
Our AI technologies leverage your existing ERP to get the most sales and profits out of your inventory.
Unlike replacing your entire purchasing system, which frequently takes more than six months for full implementation, integrating our targeted solutions takes as little as 30 days per module.
Here are the results our clients have seen:
As a team of supply chain analysts and technologists, we help solve your most pressing inventory challenges with advanced optimization technology that scales across your entire organization.
"Cutting POs for certain vendors used to take a buyer two full days of analysis, so they could only cut the POs every two or three months. Now those same vendor POs can be cut every two weeks because it only takes 15 minutes using Thrive."
Adison Korsgaard
Vice President of Finance