Grupo Real

After the implementation of Slimstock’s planning solution, Grupo Real, a Brazilian automotive specialist, upgraded its forecasting capabilities, automated manual tasks and gained the visibility needed to make strategic, data-driven decisions. The result is a more resilient supply chain, stronger financial performance and teams now aligned behind a shared planning model.

With over six decades of experience, Grupo Real has a rich history of pioneering mobility throughout the region. Today, the automotive specialist manages five leading brands – RMP, Disape, MIDE Parts, REAL Duas Rodas and PER – supplying a broad range of automotive and motorcycle parts. Grupo Real is 100% focused on providing innovative and efficient solutions to keep its partners moving forward.

Facing the complexity of a large-scale supply-chain operation, Grupo Real sought to improve its supply-chain planning and inventory management by digitalising and standardising workflows across its network. To enable this transformation, the company selected Slimstock’s solution as the cornerstone of the project.

Challenge

Grupo Real handles a very large assortment: tens of thousands of SKUs across many branches and distribution points. In an environment with this level of volume and complexity, combined with traditional planning practices, the company struggled to capture demand fluctuations driven by seasonality, promotions, market movements and one-off events.

In this context, Grupo Real set the optimisation of inventory management as a priority to ensure balanced stock levels, use of working capital more efficiently, increase product availability across branches by reducing stockouts, and respond more quickly to demand fluctuations, raising service levels and improving customer satisfaction.

The solution

By adopting Slimstock’s solution, Grupo Real committed to digitising and standardising its supply-chain planning and inventory management workflows. Slimstock’s platform was designed to deal with high volumes and complexity, handling large numbers of SKUs, orders, branches and customers.

“We now have access to a powerful tool capable of handling a huge volume of data. With various statistical models, including seasonality, Slimstock’s solution provides a forecast with lower error and deviation rates.” | Daniel Garcia, Director of Supply Chain and Operations at Grupo Real

The result is not only improved forecasting. There was also a shift in planning logic: purchasing becomes demand-driven. “Purchases now follow forecasted sales, rather than being dictated to branches, which previously pressured sales to clear stock. This enables better long-term planning, from 2–6 months ahead, more strategic supplier negotiations, and improved cost and price management”, adds Daniel.

Through Slimstock’s solution, Grupo Real standardised supply-chain planning, improved visibility across its distribution network, and moved from reactive or intuition-based purchasing to data-driven, forecast-based replenishment.

Benefits and business impact

Higher product availability

With Slim4’s advanced forecasting and seasonality modelling, Grupo Real significantly reduced stockouts across its network. By understanding true demand patterns, the business now ensures products are available when customers need them, directly improving service levels and customer satisfaction.

Lower inventory levels

By aligning purchasing with accurate demand forecasts, Grupo Real eliminated excess stock and freed up cash previously tied up in inventory. This optimisation has strengthened the company’s financial performance while reducing operational risk.

Less manual work

Slim4 automated time-consuming tasks such as average calculations and manual purchase requests. This shift allowed planners and buyers to spend more time on high-value activities, including supplier negotiations, performance improvement initiatives, and long-term planning.

Deeper supplier insights

With better visibility and additional analytical capacity, the team now evaluates sales maturity curves, identifies slow-moving items, and compares supplier performance with far more precision. This data-driven approach enhances portfolio management and supports more informed procurement decisions.

Stronger teams alignment

Implementing a structured planning model required cultural change, but Slim4’s transparency helped secure buy-in across departments. The purchasing team now has full confidence in the process, resulting in unified decision-making and consistent adoption of best-practice planning.

Enhanced planning

Slim4’s simulation capabilities allow Grupo Real to model future inventory scenarios and plan months ahead. This forward-looking approach strengthens commercial negotiations, improves cost management and helps integrate day-to-day operations with strategic business planning.

Success factors

From the Slimstock and Grupo Real’s own reflections, the success of this transformation hinges on a few critical factors:

• Scalability and data-handling capacity: The ability of Slim4 to manage the complexity and scale tens of thousands of SKUs, many branches and high volume of demand data, was fundamental.
• Forecasting sophistication: Using proper statistical forecasting (considering seasonality, demand variation, etc.) rather than simplistic averages allowed Grupo Real to better track market dynamics, promotions and natural demand fluctuations.
• Simplicity and usability: Although powerful, Slim4 provided a user-friendly interface and simple workflows, facilitating adoption across teams, reducing resistance to change and ensuring engagement.
• Collaborative partnership: Slimstock demonstrated flexibility and a collaborative spirit: when custom analyses were needed beyond the standard platform, Slimstock worked with them to develop additional views and features, showing real alignment with business needs.
• Cultural and process change: Moving from intuitive/average-based planning to a structured, data-driven S&OP framework required convincing people and reshaping established processes. Slim4, together with stakeholder engagement, enabled this shift.

“Looking ahead, we see huge potential in evolving towards AI. We’re already connecting our commercial systems so that forecasts don’t rely solely on historical sales, but also on real-time signals like quotations and upcoming product launches. With Slimstock, we feel confident this next step will help us anticipate market demand even better,” concludes Daniel.