TruAudio finds true clarity in their inventory using Netstock

Managing inventory internationally

With warehouse locations in the US, China, and Holland, TruAudio had clearly outgrown their previous inventory management tools. Like many growing businesses in their position, they relied on the outdated workflow of dumping data from their ERP into a spreadsheet.

That’s not an ideal process for any company, and an ambitious business like TruAudio needed a tool that could produce far more accurate orders and create a smarter inventory policy that works internationally. The inventory planners in the company needed help. They wanted to integrate a new ERP system, NetSuite, which provided an opportunity to improve their inventory replenishment process.

Inventory spreadsheet hurt planning

“We were doing things based on a very detailed Excel sheet, but we were still limited by what you can input into Excel,” said Justin Dudley, TruAudio’s Logistics Director. “The process of inputting the information was very, very tedious, and time-consuming.

A lot of [the problem] was overstock, and a lot of it was under-stock, and the lack of input you could have with an Excel sheet made you susceptible to both problems,” added Dudley.

Drilling down on inventory issues

“We did not have visibility, and now we do. Whether that’s through stockholding numbers, which is what our CEO is paying attention to, or whether that’s my evaluating excess stock, surplus orders, and stock-outs, it gives us visibility and a greater level of accountability,”

“Before, we didn’t really have any data to go off of other than ‘we’re out of this, and nobody’s paying attention to how much we have of that.’ So, Netstock really helps the bottom line of the company.” Dudley said.

Solving the big problems first

The Netstock app shines when it’s focusing the attention of inventory planners in a company. The “Top 5” sections on the dashboard breakdown what’s going wrong and how important the problem is.

“For example: Today, I pulled the report for our North America locations and broke the report down to just the top ten or fifteen items that were stocked out or potentially stocked out. I was able to delve into each item and give our leadership team a reason as to why each one of those items was out of stock. Very quickly, you have visibility and accountability, and you can even come up with solutions,” Dudley said.

A clear return on investment

TruAudio is a growing business that couldn’t have any hiccups when implementing Netstock, and the onboarding process proved to be relatively easy. And a smooth implementation meant TruAudio got a fast return.

So how does TruAudio measure the value of their inventory planning tool?

“One of our warehouses had an issue with excess stock that Netstock helped us identify. We were able to save money by redistributing that stock to the right places, and we cut the value of the excess stock at that warehouse by nearly half in just six months,” commented Dudley. “The ROI we get from Netstock makes it an easy investment decision.”