EET Europarts is one of the world’s largest IT-distributors and sells print and spare parts, and they sell accessories to computers, sound, and networks in all of Europe. The EET Group has sales offices in 27 countries over most of Europe. The group employs almost 600 employees, serves more than 46.000 dealers, and expedites more than 1 million deliveries a year. Most of the dispositions mainly happen manually through approx. 15 schedulers, spread out around Europe. Many sales offices also have their own stock.
The journey
In September 2019, the EET Europarts began the implementation of Service Optimizer 99+ (SO99+), which is sold and implemented by Optilon. The first countries aired in February, incl. the main storage in Ballerup. More countries joined in March. The purpose was to update the company’s approach to planning through Supply Chain, so that it matched the commercial requirements with regards to responsiveness and volatility, which is experienced in the market.
Tom Kjærulf, Logistics Director of the EET Group says: “We’ve only just began that application of SO995 and it generally happened simultaneously with the spread of the coronavirus, but we are in control. I don’t even dare to think about how our commercial situation would have looked, if we had not implemented SO99+. Earlier, we used Axapta and a lot of Excel sheets to make the best decisions regarding order sizes and delivery time etc., but these were not optimal decisions.”
Results
We have a lot of the same items spread out on several repositories, but with a very limited overview of how the other repositories organize their storage. Often, we made local, but not holistic optimization, and this entailed unnecessarily high storage costs and not always the best levels of service.
Today, all our items and repositories are established in SO99+, and we are in control. Twice a day, the SO99+ is updated with the latest Supply and Demand-data, and we can quickly get an extensive overview of the situation. We can see the consequences of lacking deliveries from, for instance, China, and observe the changes in demand. A lot of the “trivial” dispositions have now been automated, which means we have more time for the meaningful decisions. Without SO99+, we would have been chanceless.
Optilon is a trustworthy and competent partner
The implementation of SO99+ has been executed satisfactorily. The Optilon consultants are competent, energetic, and pedagogical. Optilon has been great with regards to explaining complex problems in a simple and comprehensible way. Beyond this, Optilon has explicitly shown that they understand our business. We’ve had many great, professional discussions with the Optilon consultants, and they’re not afraid to challenge our way of thinking.
We can clearly feel that Optilon has done a lot of SO99+ projects, and they know how one attains commercial value from the system. Optilon also has a good understanding of our company, and this gives us a sense of safety. It has given us a sense of safety during the implementation process, and it continually gives us a sense of safety, so that we are well-prepared for the challenges of the future. Now, we’re looking forward to begin using SO99+ in our everyday life, and we have particularly high expectations that the expected results are attained.
