Inact Now is used in meetings where the purchasing, production and warehouse departments plan how to balance delivery performance and costs. Soon, marketing will also be onboarded so they can get a common understanding across the board.
Case: Vikan
Delivery performance is key
“With the help of Inact, we suddenly realized that there were some items we were handling incorrectly.”
– Interview with Planning Manager at Vikan, René Kälberg
Day-to-day delivery requires high standards in production and inventory
At Vikan, they promise their customers day-to-day delivery on orders up to 25,000 pieces per order. This means that customers can order anything from 1 dishwashing brush up to 25,000 pieces with a guaranteed shipment within 24 hours.
With around 3200 item numbers, this adds up to an enormous complexity that makes correct decisions in the inventory and production difficult. On the one hand, they need to be able to meet fast delivery on large orders, while at the same time trying to keep costs and inventory value as low as possible.
Lack of insight and action
Why did you choose to invest in Inact?
To manage complexity and improve delivery performance without increasing our costs, data-driven decisions in our supply chain are essential. But to make the right decisions, you need tools that can serve data in a way that makes it easy to act.
And we were missing those tools. We had a lot of tools, but no one could help us understand or act on the data. Without this overview, we struggled to see what we were doing right or wrong and how we could optimize. We often navigated by gut instinct and lacked direction. This was really the reason why we chose to invest in Inact.
Raw and finished goods analytics created a better overview
Inact Now segments and analyzes the company’s raw and finished product. This made it clear where we needed to take action to improve our delivery performance and ensure we had the right items in stock.
Inact Now is very good at gathering all the data and doing automatic segmentation analysis for us. When we got the analytics, we could suddenly see that there were a lot of items we were handling incorrectly. The platform serves all the data and makes it hard NOT to act on the problem.
"The platform serves all the data and makes it hard NOT to act on the problem."
Segmentation for proper production planning
The segmentations in Inact Now form the basis of how we manage our supply chain. Right now, we are in the process of creating policies for each segment that will make it easy for everyone to understand how each item number should be handled.
We are still in the start-up phase with Inact Now. But we’re getting closer all the time. Right now, we are in the process of setting up policies for how we should act on our products based on our ABC/XYZ segments. They will form the basis for everything we do.
The segmentations must support a differentiated approach that ensures that we neither produce too much of low-value products nor too little of high-value products. In other words, a perfect balance between cost and demand.
Maintain satisfied customers and high delivery performance
I have no doubt that our new, more systematic approach to raw and finished goods will have a positive impact on our delivery performance and profitability.
You can compare it to a radio with some buttons, and now we systematically start turning them one by one. We know exactly where we’re turning and why we’re doing it. We fully expect to see the impact directly on our costs and delivery performance. And when that happens, we’ll know exactly what it is that has created the improvement.
Resultats
Better collaboration across the board
Greater overview
With Inact Now as a production planning tool, Vikan has gained greater visibility into the performance of individual items and now knows how to manage them to increase delivery performance and lower costs.
Extremely high delivery performance
Although Vikan has lowered their inventory value with Inact Now, it hasn’t affected their extremely high delivery performance. In other words, they have created a healthier inventory.
Vikan
Vikan is one of the world’s leading suppliers of hygienic cleaning tools for the food industry and other hygiene-sensitive environments. Their cleaning tools are sold in more than 90 countries and the company has more than 100 years of experience.
