Aquatic AV reduced its inventory holding by over $1 million and improved its customer fill rate from 79 – 99%

ERP challenges

Although Aquatic AV is a relatively small business, they have diverse needs and service customers in many different industries. They carry over 500 items, from raw materials to finished goods, and many high-value, warrantied items must be serialized. The ERP solution they were using could not efficiently record serial numbers. The process was labor-intensive, and the ERP processing was slow and cumbersome. As a result, Aquatic AV migrated its ERP to Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Demand planning challenges

Before Netstock, Aquatic AV used spreadsheets and basic built-in reports to manage their inventory. Having a seasonality aspect with some of their SKUs and running multiple warehouses added a level of complexity that was not manageable or scalable using spreadsheets.” When you don’t have a visual representation of month over month and year over year, it’s tough to know how much and, more importantly, when to order. We felt we were planning in the dark and guessing our way through it. Implementing Netstock helped us gain complete visibility of our inventory, and we can see our combined inventory figures as well as individually, per warehouse, which has significantly benefited us from a global perspective,” says Erin Williams, Purchasing Manager at Aquatic AV.

First impressions

“My first impression after implementing Netstock was how easy it was using Netstock with the Business Central integration. I was also very impressed with the Netstock dashboard and how this gave us an instant snapshot view of our inventory. Other staff also have access to Netstock, so they can dive in and see all the information very quickly instead of asking us,” says Raffi Fills, Director of Operations at Aquatic AV.

Facing supply chain disruption

Like many companies, Aquatic AV had a hard time getting components. Lead times were long, so customers were panic buying and ordering large quantities. Raffi explains, “it’s important to trust the data that Netstock provides. There were instances with two products where Netstock recommended that we do not order. We didn’t adhere to the recommendation, ordered the stock, and found ourselves with excess stock. The Netstock data is correct and on point. However, companies should look at the order recommendations alongside industry insights and trends, as Netstock can’t possibly have foresight into that. For example, some customers switched to a different product in our portfolio as they couldn’t get the one they wanted during the COVID-19 pandemic. This affects the sales and skews the data, so having input from our sales team on issues like this helps us to adjust forecasts accordingly. With Netstock, we can make those adjustments.”

Benefits and ROI

Aquatic AV reduced its inventory holding by over $1 million and simultaneously improved its customer fill rate from 79 – 99% within the first year of using Netstock. They credit this to the visibility they have on the Netstock dashboard. “I can see our excess inventory, which means I can action those items with our sales team and get them to focus their efforts on selling them. I can see our stock-outs and potential stock-outs so we can prioritize these orders with our factories. Besides this snapshot in the dashboard, we can view individual product pages and see a specific product’s lead time, how much we should order, and how much safety stock we should have – this gives us total control over our inventory.”

Not only did they save time by automating their forecast calculations, but also within their ERP processes. “Now that Business Central has enabled Aquatic AV to track their serial numbers more reliably, feeding more accurate data into Netstock, we find that everything is working much better,” comments Raffi.

Erin adds, “ I think the ability to take data from Netstock and use it in SQL, Tableau, BI, or Excel is very valuable for any company as data scientists use raw data all the time. We can see what we want to see in a logic that represents our business. Before, I was adding everything manually into a very basic table, and there was no way to have algorithms or calculations the way Netstock has it available to us. The process before would take several hours. Now, I can have a table ready in about 30 minutes with all the information our company needs.