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CASE STUDY: WICKES

Wickes Suppliers can now access daily updated sales, stock, finance and marketing data giving near real time visibility.

CLIENT
Wickes -  www.wickes.com
PROJECT
Improved Supplier Portal for visibility, engagement and transparency of sales, finances, stock movement.
WHAT WE DID
Re-design and re-engineer the existing solution using our in-house product - Coeus BI.
TIMELINE
Go-Live status achieved within a two-month period

PROJECT INFORMATION

Travis Perkins plc (Travis Perkins) had legacy supplier systems, where suppliers could view stock levels and understand the volume of products being sold across stores. Suppliers were provided with raw data and the ability to exact some performance measurements around availability, on-time and in full. This was a paid for service, which generated a profit-making revenue and facilitated reasonable supplier engagement.

In 2016, the system was ready for improvement, particularly on the merchant side. After consideration, Qlik technology was chosen because of its analytics and dashboarding capabilities. More specifically, the Qlik Analytics Platform was chosen because it allows you to provision dashboard views and a variety of different objects onto a webpage for external consumption

THE RELATIONSHIP

In 2019, structural changes at Travis Perkins provided Catalyst with the opportunity to totally re-design and re-engineer the existing solution using their product - Coeus BI. Taking the concept and premise of the i-supply solution, Catalyst BI achieved go-live status within a two-month period. The new system was also much faster and easier to navigate than the previous solution.

Challenges Solved

Invoice matching dashboard explains why invoices might be on hold and provides a full history.
Assists with Cost Centre Code alignment
Reconciles Consignment stock data
Allows suppliers to monitor their monthly performance
Helps them to understand how much Wickes has bought, how much has been sold and how much is left

Helps their operations become much slicker and far more dynamic

Aids suppliers with building inventory, as it helps planning around how much they need to make, how many pallets are required  and even how many delivery drivers

Fencing suppliers use i-supply to work out the demand at store level of their top four products. They can be discerning in where they send panels to, avoiding those who already have stock or who, historically, for whatever reason have not experienced a high level of sales.

THE IMPROVEMENTS

SALES UPLIFT 137% sales uplift week on week
(Market leader saw 50%)  
Geo Tracking Performance by Region can be
tracked and measured.  
VISBILITY Improved visibility now prevents problems such as low stock  

"This project flew, people can’t believe how quickly the project landed. This is because Catalyst are skilled at finding the best solution for their customers."

"A great example of the Catalyst way – agile enough to be able to reprioritise to ensure Wickes’ customers are happy. They help us to build BI that gives people the motivation factor"

Sam GreenWickes, i-Supply Manager

"We’ve always been quite a heavy user of i-supply, but since the COVID-19 lockdown (and the increase of shopper demand), the daily sales analysis and split of online/c&c, and visibility of the distribution/weight of sales has become invaluable.

It has allowed us to firstly gain insight into this quite unique situation, but also to support and help our supply chain colleagues with potential forecast demand. We can see adapting shopper habits and SKU’s experiencing increased demand.

This has enabled us to support our supply chain through more accurate forecasting and by identifying a 50 SKU ‘priority list’ of products the factories could focus production on, whilst minimising lost sales."

Yusuf AlharrariAkzoNobel, Senior Customer Business Manager
“During lockdown SCA were able to maintain supply to the Wickes stores despite I.T challenges in week 14 that meant our normal weekly sales update from the category team was disrupted, this lasted around 4 weeks in total. During this time SCA were able to use sales and stock data from i-supply, married to our internal forecasts, in order to keep our production lines running and our distribution site at Stoke fully operational in order to maintain stock availability of Pareto A/B lines to the Wickes estate. Without i-supply this would have been very much harder."
Ken ReidySCA Wood UK Ltd, Strategic Account Manager