Bloom & Wolff is a Dutch producer of artificial flowers, sourcing components and assembling them in-house into finished bouquets for both B2B and B2C markets.
Challenge
With growing bouquet assembly volumes across B2B and B2C channels, Bloom & Wolff wanted an external view on whether its systems and processes were set up to scale with this growth. A key complicating factor was the difficulty of forecasting volumes accurately: immature forecasting processes made it hard to translate expected sales growth into reliable, future-proof requirements for planning, purchasing and storage capacity. On top of this, significant stock differences were showing up in the systems, with considerable volumes of stock effectively disappearing between registration and physical count. This pointed to gaps in the accuracy of stock administration and raised questions on how the administrative flows for incoming components versus finished bouquets should be organised, and how the process should evolve to keep pace with volume growth, without basing capacity decisions on unreliable volume and stock assumptions.
Solution and deliverables
4Supplychain provided advisory input on the warehouse design question, without taking on implementation:
- Review of the current administrative flows for component storage and bouquet assembly.
- Assessment of volume forecasts and growth assumptions across B2B and B2C channels, and their implications for planning, purchasing and storage requirements
- Analysis of stock differences, identifying likely causes behind the disappearing stock in the system and their impact on reliable capacity planning
- Development of recommendations to structurally reduce future stock differences.
- Recommendations on process flows and design direction to support setting up the forecasting process. growth.
The advisory input gave Bloom & Wolff a clearer view of its process and system design options, insight into the root causes behind its stock discrepancies together with a way forward to reduce these going forward, and a more grounded basis for translating volume growth into planning and capacity requirements — providing a foundation for the organisation’s own follow-up decisions.
