Bax Music achieves grwoth thanks to improved availability

Bax Music has grown into one of the biggest players in the Benelux market for light, sound, music instruments and DJ-gear. Bax Music have offices and web-shops in 8 different countries. With an extensive assortment of around 55,000 SKUs, of which 35,000 are stocked across four stores. Maintaining consistently high levels of availability is critical to Bax shop. In order to achieve their business goals as well as to gain greater control on the growing inventory, the business took the decision to integrate Slim4 to their existing ERP.

Bax Music places a high level of importance on stock availability: “Many customers save up for months or even years to be able to afford a DJ-table, guitar or lighting set. When they order it, they want it as fast as possible. If we don’t have it in stock, the customer will go somewhere else,” explains Jochanan Bax, CEO at Bax Music. Of the 55,000 SKUs, around 90% are available in store. However, continuous rapid growth has made it increasingly more difficult to control the ever-increasing inventory levels.

Inventory management as a profession

Thanks to Slim4, Bax Music was able to professionalise their approach to inventory management. Using Slimstock’s inventory optimisation software, the product lifecycle of every article can be monitored closely and new items will only be stocked when Slim4 notifies the user. As a result, inventory levels remain in line with evolving sales patterns right from the point of introduction. Furthermore, at the end of the product lifecycle, inventory levels can be proactively reduced. Throughout the entire life cycle, seasonal peaks and trends are constantly being taken into account.

“Slim4 allows us to stay in control of everything and focus our attention on the more important items. You can see this in the final results: Since utilising Slim4, our obsolete inventory has reduced by more than half a million euros. That’s a 50% drop!” states Jochanan Bax. In addition, the service level increased by almost 5%.

Lower logististics costs

Within a few months of implementing Slim4, availability increased sharply. This resulted in an increase in turnover as well as the number of backorders being halved. With fewer backorders, logistics and shipping costs have also been reduced. “This is really nice as customers don’t pay shipping costs on orders over 50 euros.” Adds Bax.

Recently two updates were carried out: “Service levels are now automatically adapted in line with the delivery reliability of our suppliers. This allows us to anticipate out of stocks sooner. Thus, while availability continues to increase, the inventory value decreases.” In addition to this, Bax Music changed from utilising monthly calculations to weekly with Slim4. “This, in turn, means we can be more responsive to demand and thus, further improve availability. Already, we have seen an 8% improvement,” concludes the satisfied CEO.