All4Trade Customer Story

The market for Arabic and Persian products is really picking up steam in Europe. The increasing desire for Middle Eastern goods is being driven by both immigrants longing to reconnect with their cultural roots and adventurous travellers seeking to experience or reminisce about the flavours of these regions.

Following a period of rapid growth, All4Trade is now facing significant inventory management challenges. The specialist importer turned to Slimstock, and the partnership quickly proved to be a perfect fit. “Slimstock’s approach aligned perfectly with our requirements,” remarked All4Trade.

All4Trade is the perfect example of a successful family business. Around 1990, the Al Asadi family emigrated from Iraq to the Netherlands. However, they were soon missing the well-known flavours and food products of their homeland. So, Al Asadi set up his own company to import products from the Middle East to the Netherlands. A few years later, the company was taken over by his sons, two of whom are still active in the company. Sermed al Asadi is one of the two sons and looks back on the development of the family business.

“It really grew out of a need. We want our target audience to relive what they are used to from home. However, that demand for products is increasing and our growth is therefore very organic,” explains Sermed al Asadi.

Europe’s largest specialist importer

All4Trade continued to grow and in 2018 moved to a large distribution centre in Almere, where about 1,500 SKUs are stored. The family-run company has since developed into Europe’s largest importer and exporter of Arab and Persian food products from the Middle East. From Almere, the company delivers to numerous European countries and beyond with customers as far flung as Australia and New Zealand.

For many years, inventory management remained a manual undertaking. However, as the business grew, this became too much of a challenge. “We used by make inventory decisions based on gut-feel. Determining a minimum or maximum number in terms of order levels was all quite arbitrary. As a result, we regularly had too much stock for long periods of time. We learned to live with it, but our stock was causing us more and more pain,” says Al Asadi.

He decided to take a revolutionary step. Optimised supply chain planning was part of that professionalisation drive and so he looked for someone to help him set up supply chain planning. Al Asadi got in touch with senior purchaser Nienke Bouwman. “Nienke has a lot of experience and has great ideas on how we can work better. It wouldn’t be smart to close your eyes to tips from her.”

Results in just two weeks

Bouwman gained a lot of experience with Slim4 at previous employers. She is enthusiastic about the possibilities the platform offers and raised the ball to introduce the supply chain planning platform at All4Trade as well.

“There is a lot of stock knowledge in people’s heads here, but you have to put this into systems. I know this can be done very well in Slimstock’s platform. For more than 15 years I’ve had very positive experiences with Slimstock, so I introduced it here too.” Bouwman contacted Slimstock to drop by for an introduction.

Soon after, the two parties sat down together to see where they could help each other. Within two weeks, Al Asadi was convinced of the solution Slimstock could offer: “We spoke to each other no more than twice and then we were convinced.”

Al Asadi quips about the discussions he had with Slimstock’s Berry van den Oever: “We ran into challenges with our stock and explained those problems. This was mainly due to stock imbalance and lack of insight to adopt in a rapidly changing world. Berry was so convinced that Slim4 could help us and expressed this very deliberately. It also made me very enthusiastic. Slimstock’s story matched our needs exactly. If you can say with such certainty that Slim4 will work for us and it turns out that it does, I really like that. The choice was therefore quickly made.”

Added value

The implementation of Slim4 was able to start just a few weeks after the agreement. Van den Oever looked at the organisation’s culture and brought in two hand-picked consultants to guide the implementation process. Bouwman is happy with Slimstock’s personal approach: “We need to act from a certain mindset. The two consultants were a perfect fit for our organisation and were very accessible for questions. That made the process very pleasant.”

The implementation was achieved within four months and All4Trade has now been working with Slim4 for some time. Although it is still early days, the initial results are positive. Al Asadi sees the added value of Slimstock’s award-winning supply chain planning platform. “We can already see how well Slimstock’s platform works and the capabilities it offers us. I am sure we will continue to see more results, but the initial improvements are very positive.”