A case study featuring Josh Rowson, vice president of demand planning and replenishment at Princess Auto, and Darryl Landvater, a business advisor with Oliver Wight.

Princess Auto is a Canadian retailer of tools and equipment for farmers and tradespeople. It was born some 90 years ago as an automobile wrecking business in Winnipeg, subsequently moving into mail order, then opening brick-and-mortar stores beginning in the 1970s. Today, it operates 56 retail locations across all provinces.

In 2014, Princess Auto was looking to replace a manual, spreadsheet-based system for ordering and replenishment. It needed to become more efficient, increase in-stock levels, acquire better visibility and add inventory-planning capabilities, Rowson says.

Princess Auto’s chief executive officer at the time was familiar with Oliver Wight, having worked with the firm to implement distribution resource planning (DRP) in the distribution center of a large retailer. Landvater was one of the pioneers who invented DRP software for store operations — “exactly what Princess Auto was looking for,” he says.

Previous forecasting and replenishment systems failed to accurately model the business, Rowson says. Oliver Wight’s DRP tool was able to handle large volumes of data at the store level, enabling Princess Auto to determine what to order, project future inventories and even calculate the weight and cube of freight.

Rowson says the implementation included Princess Auto’s suppliers. The resulting “flowcasting” model provided suppliers with schedules and quantities of orders. “Getting them on board was essential,” he says.

The software has allowed Princess Auto to boost its in-stock rate at retail locations from 93% to as high as 98%, Rowson says — “a number we’re quite happy with.” At the same time, the company hasn’t needed to add staff at a rate commensurate with business growth. “We really are finding ways to do more with less,” he says.