Ram Tool Automates Procurement to Support Aggressive Growth
Industry: Wholesale Distribution
Products: Construction Materials
Challenges
- 37 stocking locations
- +72K inventoried materials by location
- +2.7M total materials by location
- Ram Tool supplied 92% of orders to the job site within 10 hours in 2017
- Project-specific consumption is difficult to predict and plan, as all material is specific to job site phases
- Ram Tool buyers were using offline spreadsheets and custom SAP reporting to forecast demand and plan inventory levels
Requirements for a New Process
- Automation using advanced algorithms
- Planning and execution inside SAP
- Proactive alerts to prevent customer service issues
- Simple, intuitive user adoption
- Improve purchasing efficiency and effectiveness
- No replication of master data
- No expansion of hardware landscape
- Limited change management for the users
- Affordable
Outcomes and Benefits
- 6 month, fixed bid project on time and on budget
- 32 locations initially, expanded to 40
- Stock out reduction of 8%
- 4x improvement in buyer efficiency; enabled rapid growth through acquisition without expanding support staff
- Data-driven decision in real time
- Easy user adoption; rapid time-to-value