Situation
- $100M healthcare B2B and B2C equipment and supplies e-commerce platform serving small businesses to large hospital networks
- SIOP process relied too heavily on purchasing without cross-functional support from product management and sales team leading to excess stockouts and warehouse costs
- Lacked capability in modern reporting and analytics leading to excessive non-value add work
- Forecasting method was limited to sales in the last three months
- SLKone was hired to develop a SIOP platform to codify roles and responsibilities, improve forecasting, and enable visibility into key inventory metrics
Bespoke Solutions
- Engaged key stakeholders across operations, marketing, and sales
- Created a SIOP playbook to codify the process, activities, roles and responsibilities, and supporting systems
- Developed Python and Excel tools for forecasting and accuracy tracking, and automated PO placement
- Created and implemented supporting reporting infrastructure
- Trained personnel on new process and support implementation for 6 months to ensure conformance
Leading With Results
- Reduced time to place purchase orders from two weeks to two days; enabling better purchasing control
- Improved cross-functional collaboration and enabled accountability of product managers and sales team to purchasing decisions
- Introduced PowerBI for visibility into warehouse and purchasing KPIs to support the process