Half the inventory, on a network that kept changing shape
The situation
A drinking-water systems provider was building a European network the hard way, by acquisition, buying in-country dispenser businesses and turning each into a business unit. Over the course of the work the network grew from four business units to fourteen, and later toward rest of world. At the same time it was replacing a patchwork in which every acquired company ordered its own parts from its own suppliers with a single central distribution centre in the Netherlands, feeding the business units hub and spoke by truck several times a week, from Scandinavia to Iberia and out into Eastern Europe. The distribution centre was itself supplied by container from an internal sister factory and from third-party suppliers direct.
The recurring decision was replenishment: what to hold and what to order, at the distribution centre and at every business unit, across more than a thousand SKUs. What made it hard was that nothing held still. Part numbers changed, new products arrived and superseded ones were retired constantly, and the supply policy itself kept moving. An item would start as acquisition-company-specific, migrate onto a standard catalogue served hub and spoke, then shift again, once a business unit’s volume justified a mixed container from a supplier, to being shipped direct. Every one of those transitions changed how the item should be planned.
The work
Kinetica built a bespoke inventory planning tool covering both halves of the flow: ordering from supply into the central distribution centre, and distribution from the centre out to the business units. It was designed around the assumption that the network and its policies would keep changing, so that an item moving from hub and spoke to direct ship, or a new business unit coming on stream, was a configuration the tool already understood rather than a rebuild. The decisions stayed consistent while the structure underneath them evolved.
The result
Days of inventory across the central distribution centre and the wider network fell by 50%, and that reduction was won during the growth and reconfiguration, not after things had settled. The same tool carried the network from four business units to fourteen and on toward rest of world, across more than a thousand SKUs and through a continuous churn of part numbers and supply modes.
The capability was not a one-off optimisation of a fixed network. It was a tool that kept making the network’s replenishment decisions well while the network itself kept changing shape.