Ideal Bathrooms stabilises inventory levels amidst rapid growth

Ensuring customers receive a fast, efficient and dependable delivery is what separates Ideal bathrooms from its competitors. With a product range that encompasses everything from shower trays to complete bathroom suites, the national bathroom distributor is the supplier of choice for merchants and retailers alike.

From their 4 strategically positioned distribution centres, Ideal offer a next day guaranteed delivery service to 99% of the UK mainland across their entire range. In order to manage the continuing growth, the team at Ideal Bathrooms turned to Slimstock to help bring more science to their planning processes

Optimised Assortment Management

Before implementing Slimstock’s inventory management solution, Slim4, the planning team relied upon their existing ERP solution to develop simple forecasts. While this enabled Nick and his team to anticipate demand, they simply could not see the influence of trends or seasonality on demand. Furthermore, there was also no way of flagging exceptions in the demand history. “With Slim4 the forecast is based on real numbers and as a result we can anticipate demand with far greater accuracy,” states Nick.

Enhanced Supplier Management

It was also key that the team at Ideal Bathrooms had the means to monitor supplier performance and take action where required. With the order book functionality within Slim4, they can now easily track delayed and missed orders and respond accordingly. Nick explains “We already have in place structured supplier performance improvement programmes. However, through combining these insights from Slim4 with the metrics collected from other sources, we will further improve the way we work with suppliers.”

Although Slim4 has only been in place for a few months, Nick has big ambitions for the future: “Now that we are confident with Slim4, we want to improve our operations further by increasing the level of automation as well as continuing to refine our processes.” Nick goes on to conclude: “From start to finish, the implementation of Slim4 has been a huge success and I have no doubt that Slim4 will play a crucial role in helping us to keep up with our rapid year on year growth.”