SUCCESS STORY

BayWa establishes resilient inventory planning with ADD*ONE

BayWa AG is a globally active company for innovative and sustainable solutions in the areas of electricity, heating and mobility, agriculture and nutrition as well as construction and housing.  

In order to improve the quality of its inventories, reduce costs and provide employees with holistic and systemic support, the Group relies on the intelligent inventory planning solution suite ADD*ONE from INFORM in its construction and technology divisions.

In addition to reducing the workload and gaining transparency and more efficient processes, BayWa AG is ideally equipped for times of crisis with the software.

From Excel lists and SharePoint solutions to in-house developments in the ERP system, everything was the order of the day.
Nicole Thorwarth, SCM Project Manager at BayWa AG
BayWa AG

BayWa AG's various business units face different challenges. What they have in common is that customer needs are developing rapidly due to changing market situations and new standards, and new requirements are emerging. "Our customers' purchasing behavior has changed significantly in recent years," explains Nicole Thorwarth, who works as a project manager in Supply Chain Management Operations at BayWa AG. "Seasonal requirements, environmental changes, but also increasing volatility, bottlenecks in the supply chain and product shortages are numerous issues that we have to actively deal with. The war in Ukraine and the coronavirus pandemic have of course exacerbated the situation," says the project manager.

 

In order to meet these challenges, BayWa is now using the ADD*ONE solution suite to optimize inventory planning in the Building Materials and Agricultural Equipment divisions, whose core markets are in southern Germany.

Today, ADD*ONE manages the entire stock and the complete supply of goods in the central warehouses and over 450 stores in both areas. Particular attention is paid to stock level analysis, which also gives the service sales staff in the local stores a quick overview of their articles and makes suggestions as to which articles should be added to the warehouse and which should be discontinued.

 

By switching to working with the optimization software, the company was able to drastically reduce its workload and significantly relieve its employees. According to the principle of "Management by Exception", the individual dispatchers can now only concentrate on the articles that really require action. BayWa AG has also been able to make its inventory quality much more transparent. Read the full success story for more details on the project and its successes.

CHALLENGES

  • Fluctuating requirements
  • Continuously changing customer needs
  • Volatile supply chains and product shortages
  • Unmanageable system diversity
  • High manual effort and lack of information transparency
  • Overloading of existing staff and shortage of skilled workers
  • High costs in procurement logistics
  • Unrealized potential in the quality of existing inventories
  • Complex business processes

RESULTS

  • Significantly reduced workload and stress
  • More freedom for strategic work and processing special cases
  • Simplified and more transparent planning
  • Improved collaboration within the company network and with suppliers
  • Increased security of supply thanks to optimum inventory quality
  • More planning security

Download – The Whole Story

Andreas Schäfer

Andreas Schäfer

Expert for Supply Chain Optimization

Andreas Schäfer has been working for INFORM GmbH in the Inventory & Supply Chain division since 1999. In his role as sales manager, he supports interested parties from the supply chain sector in the decision-making process for selecting the optimal planning software.

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