A.C. Entertainment

A.C. Entertainment Technologies has its origins in the early 1970s and is a leading international provider of cutting-edge entertainment technology products and solutions. They supply to dealers, distributors and end users in over 80 countries. In addition to their international headquarters just outside London, they have a Northern sales office in Leeds and sister companies in Europe, North America and Asia. A.C. Entertainment turned to Slimstock due to the complexities their stock range presented and the need to provide their customers with an ever increasing level of service.

A.C. Entertainment supply over 200,000 products to their customer base, with over 10,000 being held in stock at any one time. In addition to the extensive knowledge held within the company, it is this vast product range that ensures they remain a market leader. “We offer a comprehensive one-stop shop for our customers and, as such, product availability is paramount” states Mark Tonks.

Prior to implementing Slimstock’s inventory optimisation system, Slim4, A.C. Entertainment were forecasting and planning stock using a combination of spreadsheets and their ERP system supplied by Infor. Mark Tonks goes on to say, “the vast array of products that we supply to our customers meant that we had limited visibility on elements such as trends or seasonality. Slim4, ensured that we now have much greater visibility and control of our inventory”. Mark also credits the exception handling with focussing attention where it is needed: “whether it be an unexpected demand change or an urgent inventory situation, we are now alerted to it immediately and no longer have to search for such issues.”

The project undertaken by Slimstock has also had positive effects on purchasing costs: “we now consolidate far more orders, which has reduced our ordering costs and also increased our efficiency with regards to the goods-in department”, states Mark.

The project commenced in January 2012 and the system was installed by the end of March of the same year. Mark says of the implementation: “in any software implementation there are challenges to overcome and in our case we needed to work on some of our logistic parameters, that said, the support we received from Slimstock during the project was good and very timely.”

A year on from the completion of the project, AC Entertainment are reaping the benefit of improved communication between sales and operations. Mark highlights “our forecasting and demand planning is based on much greater depth of information and enhanced decision making support, which has the knock-on effect of allowing our sales team to feed more into the buying process”. In the end, Mark states,”the key outcome is better service to our customers.”