Collingwood Lighting

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”