Challenges
NZ Safety Blackwoods sells industrial safety equipment, uniforms, and engineering and packaging supplies. It also offers specialized training courses and resources to help businesses keep their staff worksite-safe.
Business mergers meant a change in company structure and a broader need for consolidated information to be available. Essential sales and margin information, as well as inventory and stock data, were very limited and often tied up in spreadsheets.
Business mergers
Three businesses were merged into one entity, and management transitioned from a regional to a functional approach.
Inadequate forecasting and reporting tools
The company needed faster, more rigorous reporting and forecasting methods to drive growth while boosting profitability.
Deeper insight
Sales, Merchandising and Operations need a tool to “get below the superficial” and help understand root causes and forecast reliably to support sales plans.
Solutions
NZ Safety Blackwoods chose Logility’s advanced supply chain analytics solution for its ability to support the company’s short-term and long-term feature/function criteria. “Logility could provide us with the tools we needed to measure and therefore improve our performance both internally and in our customers’ eyes,” says Yvonne Boersma, NZ Safety Blackwoods’ Head of Finance.
The Merchandising team can look at revenue by category (e.g. footwear, workplace safety) and SKU, in contrast to sales views that are built around customer activity.
The business also has a better understanding of counter sales throughout their trade centers versus customer pre-orders by individual center. Consolidated KPIs help each center monitor its performance against key growth goals, such as boosting Average Ticket Value and Lines per Transaction.
Results
With Logility, the NZ Safety Blackwoods team now has easy access to timely and accurate information to support day-to-day decision-making as well as understanding longer term trends. Sales planning and forecasting is quicker and more accurate, and the company can efficiently budget at a higher level. Better visibility into pricing, margins and supplier rebates has directly impacted the bottom line, and Delivery In Full and On Time (DIFOT) has improved by 27% in 12 months, up from 66% to 93%.
NZ Safety Blackwoods now looks forward to improving the depth and breadth of its analysis through the integration of CRM and freight data into Logility, as well as refining cost-to-serve analyses at the transactional level.