With a product range of 130,000 items, A.-W. Heil & Sohn GmbH & Co. KG is one of the largest dealers for automotive spare parts and accessories in Germany. Around 10,000 items leave the central warehouse in Hanover every day and are supplied to 22 local warehouses, particularly in Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg and Saxony-Anhalt. From there, independent garages are supplied "just-in-time" several times a day. By using Inform's ADD*ONE software, the company now wants to equip itself for the increasing complexity of the spare parts business, maximize parts availability and optimize inventories. The intensive collaboration for the project began in April 2020.

"We are part of the structural change in the automotive industry. To ensure that the industry can continue to operate economically in the future, supply chains must become more networked in the long term, regardless of the current crisis," says Heil & Sohn Managing Director Jörg Kasten. He wants to achieve this goal by using the intelligent planning system, which not only improves the company's own service and reduces process costs, but also provides suppliers with more reliable forecasts for future orders. Up to 16 employees from planning and purchasing will be able to use the new software to gain more foresight and transparency regarding the stock situation and the development of each individual item. At the same time, the automation of orders and the management-by-exception approach should give them more freedom to deal with strategic issues. Kasten is convinced of the success of this project: "Our workflows will improve significantly with ADD*ONE".

Maximum availability is Heil & Sohn's top priority, especially for spare and wear parts. An optimization project in the area of materials management based on the existing scheduling system has already significantly increased delivery capability in the past. Not enough for Kasten: "There is even more potential for improvement and savings in our processes, but we were unable to exploit this due to the one-dimensional planning in the old software." In future, the Inform system will offer Heil & Sohn a variety of sophisticated calculation methods based on artificial intelligence and operations research. It calculates cost-optimized order proposals for each individual item on a daily basis and automatically recognizes all consumption patterns. Items whose expected demand is easy to forecast can then be procured fully automatically. "In addition to the benefits for inventory management, we were also impressed by the user-friendliness of ADD*ONE and the prospect of achieving even more optimization in our logistics processes in the long term with additional modules such as network planning," concludes Kasten.