Case studies

USING AVERCAST TO CUT BACK ON ORDERS

OOLY is a craft office supplies company with a vision to inspire creativity and provide quality products for those who share the same desire to “make the world a more colorful place.” (OOLY. com) OOLY was founded in 2005 by Carol Pankiw Tyner and is headquartered in Oceanside, CA. Before upgrading to Avercast, Matt Peters, VP of Operations, recalled, “Everyone had their own catalog that they kept for the season, and it had their notes next to each item in it. And so, they would have an inventory meeting, run through the items that they knew from just being out in the warehouse, or hearing from customers that were selling out, or having difficulty with supply. We would go down the orders and say, ‘okay, here we need this much.’ It was a very casual process.” Recalling the previous process when he first started working at OOLY, Matt Peters said, “when I got here, one of the issues was that the company was suffering some fairly large stock outs. There were two [main pain points]: one, the rapid growth; two, the planning and forecast purchasing process didn’t mesh very well. Our inventory was getting outstripped by the order rates. And so, we plug it in Avercast, forecasted things out, and came back and said, ‘alright, if we’re going to supply this inventory, the sales increase, we need to buy this inventory.’ There was a fairly large jump in inventory.”

A consistent issue OOLY had been facing was stock outs, and the higher than optimal inventory turns reflected that. “We’d be getting a delivery in, sell it through, and be out of stock. So, the turns were looking good, but customer service was not happening, order processing was not happening,” says Matt. He recalls that the company image in the market place was “that [OOLY] was always out of stock, couldn’t deliver, and always ship backorders [where] customers had to wait forever to get their [orders].” “Within a year, we corrected our image in the marketplace. […] We were able to… optimize our [inventory turns].” “Then the sales sloped off, so we’ve been using Avercast to cut back on orders… on inventory. It’s good to have the visibility. It would have been wild doing it out of catalogs!” “The real problem with the old system was that it was not sophisticated enough… to run a business. The labor-intensive part of it wasn’t the forecasting and procurement process. It was the running the business with the results of not having a forecasting [software].”

With implementation time being a short two weeks, OOLY was up and running with state of the art forecasting software in no time. Since implementing Avercast at OOLY, Matt doesn’t “lose sleep at night with an eggshell excel mess.” Like many businessmen, Matt recognized that “Excel will only handle so much. Having something that’s candid, dependable, repeatable and fast, that’s the first thing that’s important. Second is the flexibility that it can be tailored to fit different businesses being exception based.” Much to Matt’s pleasure, he found “It doesn’t take much time to actually use the software. Once it’s up and running, it becomes almost a background exercise.” “I’ve recommended you guys three times and would do it again and [customer service] is one of the main reasons. […] It doesn’t get any better than what you guys do.”

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