Dolphin Pacific provides pool chemicals & equipment to pool shops and builders around NZ, based in Auckland.
They have a heavy seasonal trend since most people in NZ only use their pools in the summertime meaning their demand spikes a lot over the summer and drops significantly over the winter months.
Also, every year the product range changes, with new products coming on the market – eg: healthier chemicals, or new fashion pool components, colours, fittings etc. If old products are still sitting on the shelf from the previous year’s spikes they can be difficult to sell and often have to be sold for less than cost, which wastes money.
Before using StockTrim they found it difficult to know what products to order to make sure they had enough to meet the demand from builders over the busy summer months. If they didn’t have enough their customers would go elsewhere. They also had too many products that were over-ordered and ended up sitting on the shelf, taking up space & using capital over the quiet winter months.
Also, since a lot of their suppliers are overseas, it often takes several months for orders to arrive so they need to think ahead to pre-emptively order enough stock to meet the demand for the summer spikes. This was often done at the wrong time, missing deadlines or the wrong products were ordered.
StockTrim has helped them by predicting the demand for the seasonal trends and creating the order plans in advance so that the right products are ordered at the right time. They’ve had fewer stock-outs, and fewer over-ordered products wasting space on the shelf.
A special feature of StockTrim is that for new products without a sales history, you can link the demand models to similar products. Other systems on the market can’t predict sales for new products since there is no history. For example, if one chemical becomes obsolete, and is replaced with a new more environmentally friendly product, you’d expect the demand to be roughly the same. So, StockTrim will assume this and set the order recommendations for the new product. This helps remove a lot of uncertainty around how much to order for new products on the market that haven’t been sold before.
They use Unleashed to manage their inventory records, and with the one-click integration, it takes only 5 minutes to import the latest data to automatically make the forecasts and create the order plans.