Cambridge Utilizes Real-Time Visibility with Cloud Inventory®
Cambridge, an industry-leading producer, and distributor of paving stones and wallstones, has significantly improved its approach to inventory management through its transition to Cloud Inventory®, a mobile-first inventory management solution. Cloud Inventory provides real-time, accurate visibility and control across the supply chain, making it an easy choice for Cambridge, which sought to meet an ambitious rapid fulfillment sales model of picking, packing, and shipping an entire trailer-load of inventory in as little as 90 minutes. The deciding factor that led Cambridge to seek Cloud Inventory solutions was its need to accurately monitor and manage a significant amount of inventory outside of its warehouses in real-time.
With a dealer network in over twenty states and a centralized manufacturing, distribution and customer service complex that is one of the largest in North America, Cambridge needed to satisfy increasing customer demand. Its team includes 250 experienced technical, manufacturing and customer service professionals. Cambridge needed to adjust its inventory management processes to keep up with upgraded production methods and capabilities, leading to the decision to transition to Cloud Inventory’s cloud-based solution.
Cambridge had a demand for access to real-time, reliable data that traditional inventory management solutions were not able to provide on the scale at which Cambridge operates. Specifically, Cambridge needed to keep track of a high volume of inventory and materials in their yards, and they needed to satisfy a sales model that requires rapid fulfillment. Prior to its implementation of Cloud Inventory, Cambridge used a paper-based inventory management system, which made it difficult to keep up with the pace demanded by their sales goals and increasing customer-base. Using their paper-based system, Cambridge could not update the status of inventory until a day or more after the physical activity in the warehouse occurred. This lack of real-time monitoring hindered sales and left Cambridge open to gaps in customer service response times. Many of Cambridge’s dealers rely exclusively on Cambridge to supply them with outdoor living products. These dealers needed real-time access to production, inventory, and sales to meet their customers’ needs.
Cambridge chose Cloud Inventory’s Yard InventoryTM solutions to modernize their approach to inventory management. Cloud Inventory is a platform designed to provide users with real-time, accurate visibility across the supply chain, from the warehouse to the field. This cloud-based approach to inventory control avoids the human error that can occur with traditional approaches and increases the speed and accuracy with which a company can track its inventory, resulting in increased efficiency and productivity. The platform’s Yard Inventory solutions provide the flexibility to solve the unique material handling challenges of managing outdoor stock.
For Cambridge, one key component of the platform was its easy-to-use mobile interfaces. Cloud Inventory enabled Cambridge employees to monitor inventory using tablets. Cambridge was able to convert its inventory data collection processes to be entirely mobile. Using tablets, Cambridge utilizes Cloud Inventory solutions to gather real-time data about its inventory at any point on the supply chain. This includes easily recording the physical activities of inventory movements of both inbound and outbound goods. Cambridge has seen an increase in the speed and accuracy of receipts for purchase orders and transfer orders, boosting the company’s productivity and response times.
“The Cloud Inventory solution achieves our goal of real-time, mobile data capture of physical activities,” said Steve Oberfield, Senior Manager, Cambridge. “No longer is NetSuite being updated after the activity has happened; data is entered immediately so that we can make timelier and more accurate production and sales decisions. By knowing what goods we have, where they are, and in what condition, we can satisfy customers’ orders in less time, which increases inventory turnover.”
Another crucial benefit of utilizing the Cloud Inventory platform was that the low-code platform enabled Cambridge to combine its new cloud-based approach quickly and easily with its existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, NetSuite. The flexible reconfiguration capabilities of Cloud Inventory will enable Cambridge to leverage investments they have already made, leaving the company ideally positioned both to perfect a supply chain model for their existing markets, and to extend operations to a much broader geographic area, all without costly and time-consuming upheaval of prior systems. Cambridge is planning to utilize the low-code Cloud Inventory environment to have their own employees develop and deploy applications to meet their specific needs as their business evolves.
Using Cloud Inventory, Cambridge has improved efficiency and met its sales goals, and the company stands to improve their customers’ experience as it utilizes inventory visibility to reduce stockouts. The result of Cambridge’s implementation of Cloud Inventory is that the company has not only addressed the challenges it faced in striving to pick, pack and ship a truckload of inventory in under 90 minutes, but has also significantly improved its flexibility to meet future challenges as the business evolves.
Learn more about Cloud Inventory here: https://www.cloudinventory.com/about-us
