Global Wine Operations

With a stock of more than ten million bottles of wine, Global Wine Operations is one of the largest wine suppliers in the Netherlands. Before launching its supply chain transformation project, managing the stock was a time-consuming process, and the dependence on buyers made the company vulnerable to staff turnover. With the implementation of Slimstock supply planning platform, the planning process has become far more efficient and allows buyers to add more value. ‘Slim4 has made our inventory management data-driven,’ say Stefan Snel and Sylvia Noomen.

In addition to physical warehousing and transport activities, Global Wine Operations also takes care of purchasing and inventory management for its customers. ‘We are a logistics service provider and sister company of Delta Wines, which includes various importers and trading companies,’ explains Supply Chain Manager Stefan Snel. ‘On their behalf, we supply supermarket chains, liquor stores, food groups and local wine shops, mainly from stock. That stock represents our working capital, so the challenge is to keep it as low as possible while achieving the desired service level.’

Inventory management under pressure

Managing the supply chain was going well, but as the company grew, it started to become a challenge, as Sylvia Noomen, Logistics Buying Manager, explains: ‘We needed more buyers to place the right purchase orders for all those different types of wine on time. We’re talking about 5,000 different types of wine from 400 suppliers, each with different rules. We must consider the seasonal and trend sensitivity of wines, agreements on service levels, and the many promotions. All these planning restrictions were in the heads of our buyers, which made us vulnerable.’

Speaking the same language

The ERP system used by Global Wine Operations offered little support in terms of stock, so a lot of work was done in Excel. This was very labour-intensive, as buyers had to go through the entire list twice a week to see which wines needed to be ordered.

To make inventory management more efficient and less dependent on people, the company started looking for a suitable add-on to the ERP. No IT company was able to provide this. Stefan Snel highlights: “Then we came into contact with Slimstock, and everything started to move quickly. We were pleasantly surprised by the language they spoke. The people at Slimstock don’t just speak IT language, they talk about professional matters such as “service levels”, “working capital” and “seasonal patterns”; exactly the terms we use in our business. This immediately created a connection.”

Fifty promotional campaigns at once

Slim4 proved to be the perfect solution for making the planning process more efficient. Noomen: “The promotion planner in Slim4 alone saves us a lot of time. We often have forty to fifty promotions running at the same time, which our buyers had to track of manually. With Slim4, we can upload the promotion calendar in one go, and the correct stock is automatically built up and broken down for each promotion. The same happens with seasonal patterns and trends. It’s really ideal.”

Snel expects that the investment in Slim4 will quickly pay for itself thanks to the efficiency gains in the planning department. This means that he will not need to hire additional buyers as the company continues to grow in the future. But the real gain lies in the extra value that the existing buyers can now deliver thanks to the time they’ve regained. ‘They can perform stock analyses and trace where stock issues have arisen in the past. Previously, excessive stock levels would sometimes lead to heated discussions between purchasing and sales about whose fault it was. “With Slimstock’s solution, we have removed the emotion from the process and can continuously improve based on data.’

Optimal order quantities

Noomen sees many more areas for improvement that buyers can now focus on: smarter collaboration with suppliers, increasing delivery reliability and better decision-making regarding whether or not to stock a particular type of wine.

‘But we can also save a lot of costs in the operational ordering process. Slim4 calculates optimal order quantities based on handling and transport costs, and provides insight into the cost of deviating from this. If a small order leads to relatively high transport costs, a buyer may be better off postponing it. This is, of course, done in consultation with the commercial department, but it’s based on data.’

Fairly distributed workload

Global Wine Operations has now been using Slim4 for six months and has seen a significant increase in the productivity of its planning department. ‘As a manager, I also have a better overview of my buyers’ workload,’ concludes Noomen.

“My dashboard shows me exactly how many exceptions they still have to deal with. If one person has more work than another, I can shift things around to distribute the workload more fairly. This certainly wasn’t the main reason we implemented Slim4, but it’s funny how this process has now also become data-driven. In the past, employees would come to me to say they were too busy, but now it’s the other way around and we’re ahead of the game. Here too, the emotion has been taken out of it.”