ram-tool

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