Collingwood puts a spotlight on supply chain efficiency

As a British designer and manufacturer of LED lighting solutions, Collingwood Lighting has been the pioneer in the industry for over 20 years.

Committed to strengthening its market-leading position through product innovation, the lighting specialist joined forces with Slimstock to boost supply chain efficiency.

Collingwood Lighting were early innovators of LED lighting solutions and the first to supply LED products to the UK electrical wholesale market. Today, the business’ cutting-edge solutions illuminate everything from bars and restaurants to residential homes and historic monuments.

With plans to further diversify the portfolio, Luc Belaiche, Operations Director at Collingwood Lighting explains how the business is developing the supply chain to support continued growth: “To keep up with the demands of the market, we place a real focus on innovation. However, to maintain the current momentum of growth whilst sustaining the exceptional levels of service we offer our customers, we must take steps to drive efficiency across our supply chain.”

A solid foundation for optimisation

In the past, Luc and his team utilised spreadsheets in addition to the core ERP system to manage the complexity of their supply chain. “We realised that to progress, we needed to gain greater visibility over how our day to day inventory decisions impacted the wider business.”

With a focus on simplifying the forecasting, demand planning and inventory management process, Collingwood Lighting took the strategic decision to implement Slimstock’s inventory optimisation solution, Slim4.

Following the successful implementation of the tool, Luc highlights how Slim4 helped the planning team to attain significant efficiency improvements: “Given that Slim4 takes into account the key operational parameters, we now have a solid base on which we can optimise our business processes.”

Simplifying the demand planning process

Through enabling the team at Collingwood to create and manage logical product groups, Slim4 has also helped bring more structure to the demand planning team: “Our people can take complete ownership of specific areas. Furthermore, through providing greater visibility over our inventory requirements, our people can now make far more strategic decisions.”

Luc goes onto add: “Thanks to Slim4, we are now able to work our inventory much harder. Since going live with the inventory management tool, total inventory days have been reduced from 140 days to just 127. More importantly, this stock turn improvement has been achieved without impacting availability.”

Optimised workload

In addition to optimising inventory levels, a key focus of the project was to free up the time of the demand planning team to focus on other pressing issues within the business: “We are constantly evolving our product offering and in the last year alone, our portfolio has grown by around 20%. However, new products can be notoriously difficult to manage and therefore our people need time to focus on these items.”

Through automating the inventory management process, Luc and his team can now focus their time where it is required most. “Slim4 automatically creates robust forecasts and order advice for every SKU within our extensive range. Given that Slim4 does the heavy lifting for us, our planning team can review the exceptions and focus their time on the issues that really matter.”

Removing risk through diversification

Happy with results so far, Luc is keen to help the business advance further: “As our business evolves, we are looking for new ways to diversify our product range and supplier base to spread risk.”

Luc concludes: “Slim4 has been an important strategic decision to take our operation to the next level and has already played a key role in helping us to achieve these impressive performance improvements.”