Leading US Retailer

  • ThinkSmart’s Intellify provides a solution for dynamic inventory management for this nationwide household giant.

    Applying Intellify’s optimisation capabilities to aspects of this organisation’s supply chain gives significant tangible and measurable improvements. With inventory optimisation we reduce capital requirements and minimise stock wastage. Combining this with data mining capabilities determines what has happened and predicts what is likely to happen providing valuable decision making capabilities. This is then coupled with routing capabilities which always provides the optimal routes for delivering to the stores or customers.


    Case Study: Retail

    The Customer

    For a Fortune 500 American DIY chain, ThinkSmart teamed up with their recent US partner, LeanTaaS, to deliver an integrated solution. The DIY chain has over 1000 stores throughout the US and the aspect of their business that this solution addresses is equipment hire (i.e. where a member of the public can rent/hire an item such as a chainsaw or lawnmower for a period of time).

    The Problem

    Currently each store is autonomous, both in what new equipment they purchase to hire to consumers, and that which they sell off at a discount to balance their supply and demand patterns. However, this balance for equipment differs from store to store. Therefore an opportunity exists to optimize the matching of stores and products in a dynamic manner, so that they share more effectively the equipment. Therefore, a store with a surplus of one type of equipment can now share this with one which would normally need to buy it new themselves. The problem is to determine the best allocation of products between stores to optimize the financial savings, while minimizing the transportation costs.

    ThinkSmart’s Solution

    The Intellify architecture is ideally suited to model and solve this problem efficiently, and it was possible to embed it within LeanTaaS Business Information dashboard in a matter of days. This enabled our partner rapidly deploy the solution with their customer delivering value immediately.

    Capability Provided

    ThinkSmart provides Optimisation and Intellify integration capabilities for this Fortune 500 company.

    Business Value Demonstrated

    Deploying this solution saves the company an estimated $20-30m per annum on a subset (10%) of their stores within the hire part of their business.