B2B Distribution: Operations & Inventory Intelligence
CASE STUDY 03 · B2B DISTRIBUTION · OPERATIONS & INVENTORY INTELLIGENCE
$800K in Excess Inventory. No One Had Noticed Because No One Could See It.
A regional building materials distributor was carrying months of excess stock in three of its six warehouses while the other three were routinely going out of stock on the same SKUs. DataVines built the cross-warehouse visibility that made this pattern impossible to ignore.
ABOUT THE CLIENT
A privately held building materials distributor based in Portland, Oregon, supplying lumber, insulation, and roofing components to contractors. They operated six warehouse locations across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Each warehouse ran its own inventory system, and none of them talked to each other.
The Challenge
The operations director had a theory: the business was simultaneously overstocked in some locations and undersupplied in others. Each warehouse maintained inventory in a standalone instance. Consolidation was a manual, weekly process using Friday CSVs that were stale by the time they were read.
WHERE THINGS BROKE DOWN • Six standalone inventory instances with no real-time cross-location visibility. • Manual reconciliation consuming a full analyst day every week. • Excess stock in one location was invisible to managers dealing with stockouts in another.
The DataVine Solution
The Solution
- Building the data foundation • Built real-time API integrations with all six warehouse instances. • Created a unified SKU master to eliminate reconciliation friction. • Integrated forward demand signals from the order management system.
- OPERATIONAL IMPACT & EFFICIENCY • $800K in excess inventory redistributed without new purchase orders. • 34% reduction in stockout incidents in the first 90 days. • Inventory lag reduced from 5 days to 15 minutes.
- WHAT COMES NEXT DataVines is building a seasonal demand forecasting model to pre-position stock before peak selling periods.
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