CamLab LTD.

Merged Companies Result in Redundant Stock

In 2007, Camlab Ltd, a laboratory equipment distributor acquired Patterson Scientific Ltd, combining inventories for total of 40,000 SKUs and a value of ₤1.6M (approximately US$2,400,000). Housing the stock at a central location was an expensive and time consuming task.

“We knew we had a major issue with redundant, dead and out of date inventory. But our software continued to recommend purchasing additional stock of the same items,” comments Maurice Riley, Operations Manager at Camlab.

Several months after the merger, the purchasing staff was still manually manipulating spreadsheets to re-balance the inventory. They had man-aged to significantly reduce their in-vestment to ₤800’000 (approximately US$910,000) through write offs and attrition; however, they knew there was an easier and more efficient solution.

“We spent at least 8 hours a day sorting through spreadsheets to manually approve or delete the purchase orders our software was recommending,” notes Maurice. “Even spending a whole day, every day of the week was not enough time to get it all done and the process was laden with errors.”

Desperate for change, Camlab reached out to their software consultant, Balloon One, distributor for Valogix® Inventory Planner in the UK

The Downward Trend to Balanced Stock

One of Camlab’s priorities was to rebalance their inventory for the A and B lines while increasing service levels across all lines. After implementing VALOGIX, their overall inventory spend decreased over the previous six months and their service levels.

As seen in the graphs above, be-ginning at week 35 when Valogix was implemented, Camlab experienced a dramatic increase in service levels across all lines while realizing a 7.5% decline in overall inventory value down to ₤740,000 (approximately US $841,000).

Dead inventory, once valued at ₤384’000 (approximately US $436,352) experienced a decrease of nearly 50% in just six months and is now at just ₤202’000 (approximately US $229,539).

Automated Systems Lead to Fast Return on Investment

In addition to spending and inventory reductions, Camlab has seen enormous gains in productivity. What was once a job that consumed every day of the week is now a 10-hour a week process.Camlab estimates they save approximately 30 hours a week or ₤15’278 per year. (approximately US$20,677) per year.

Camlab achieved full ROI in February 2010—just six months after implementation.