Patrick Erb

Head of Purchasing | Wilhelm Rink GmbH & Co. KG

"We have become light years better with Slimstock"

Wilhelm Rink, a leading electrical wholesaler, relies on Slimstock’s supply chain expertise and advanced solution to optimise and automate its purchasing processes. The family-owned business from Solms has a total of nine locations and sells a wide range of over 1 million items, of which around 200,000 are stocked. This is accompanied by a high level of complexity in demand and inventory planning. However, with high levels of backorders, struggling demand, and increasing cancellations of pre-orders, the business faced significant supply chain challenges.

Due to the limitations of their current IT infrastructure, the electrical wholesaler chose to implement Slimstock’s supply chain planning platform. Thanks to Wilhelm Rink’s high data quality and Slimstock’s many years of industry experience in electrical wholesaling, the solution was successfully adopted within just 4 months and already Slimstock’s platform is creating enormous added value.

Before the introduction of Slimstock’s platform, Wilhelm Rink relied solely on an ERP system, which made planning more difficult due to its inflexible structure. The company was guided by rigid min/max stock levels, which each location had to define manually. In many cases, this led to overstocking, as uncertainties and a lack of key figures meant that excessive quantities were often ordered and as many items as possible were stocked in large quantities.

Patrick Erb, Head of Purchasing at Wilhelm Rink GmbH & Co. KG explains: “We didn’t have an advanced calculation model in the background that could tell us whether the stocks we were holding were actually the right ones.”

Slimstock ensures fully digitalised inventory planning

This has now changed thanks to Slimstock’s award-winning platform, which paves the way for fully digitalised inventory planning, ensuring maximum flexibility with efficient analyses and dynamic forecasts.

Reorder and safety stock levels are now adjusted to the current situation on a daily basis and orders are automatically replenished as required based on mathematically supported forecasts: “What was previously only possible through manual intervention is now done entirely with the help of the automated calculation models. Slimstock’s platform specifies how much should be stored at which location and what quantity we need to keep in stock in the main distribution centre in order to optimally supply the branches,” says Patrick Erb.

“Thanks to Slimstock, we have improved by light years in this respect and no longer have to rely on our gut feeling,” adds the head of purchasing.

Slimstock’s EOQ (Economic Order Quantity) module, which automatically calculates the economic order quantity and thus provides valuable support for the dispatchers, also contributes to this. Furthermore, not only do they have the option of creating their own to-dos in the platform, but the software’s “Management by Exceptions” philosophy also ensures that replenishment focuses exclusively on the items that matter the most.

The company also sees great added value in Slimstock’s intuitive user interface: “We needed software that is both powerful and easy to use. Slimstock combines both in its web-based interface. This gives us significantly greater transparency compared to before and allows us to access all information in a much shorter time,” says Patrick Erb.

“The platform also offers us much more depth of detail. I don’t know of any software that can visualise the complexity of such a large article master with such simplicity.” For example, the KPI dashboard shows all the important key figures, such as the service level or the overstock value at a glance, and – like the graphics in the BI dashboard – can also be conveniently viewed via the Slimstock app. This means that data that previously required a great deal of effort to obtain can now be found with just a few clicks of the mouse, which increases the efficiency of processes many times over.

Centralised planning

Furthermore, the success is already reflected – 6 months after the introduction of Slimstock – in a significant optimisation of the entire supply chain processes. With the help of Slimstock, it has been possible, among other things, to replace the previously decentralised organisation of purchasing with central planning at the headquarters in Solms. In addition, Slimstock’s solution is operated according to the latest security standards (ISO27001 certified) and receives a product update every three weeks automatically.

“The regular product updates were a decisive criterion for us. It was important for us to introduce software that is being updated with new functionalities,” says Patrick Erb, explaining the decision: “Slimstock was the clear winner in the selection process – not only in terms of usability, but also with regard to the possibilities and performance that the system offers.”

Further intensification of cooperation

Driven by this high level of satisfaction, the company would like to intensify its collaboration with Slimstock in the future and introduce further solutions from the supply chain planning expert. These include the customer forecasting module, which allows Rink to identify even more quickly whether selected items are mainly purchased by certain customers, for example. In addition, Slimstock’s S&OP planning tool will also be used in the medium-to-long-term to seamlessly align capacity restrictions, resources, and stock levels with the sales budget and further optimise process efficiency.