How eMoksha helped a Steel Fabricator/Distributor
resolve its demand forecasting challenges

eMoksha was approached by Lyman Steel, leading steel fabricator/distribution company that was growing rapidly. The company was facing several challenges in the demand planning processes and customer order fulfillment

Challenges

  • Demand forecasting process was error-prone and required lots of manual input
  • The analysis function was performed in excel sheets, involving gut feeling and dependence on the staff experience resulting in stockouts and customer frustration
  • The post-pandemic supply chain volatility and market conditions were rendering manual processes ineffective
  • The window to place an order with suppliers was drastically cut and these manual processes simply could not keep up with the timeline and volume of data

Solution

Our demand prediction-based order recommender system precisely predicts and gives recommendations by leveraging 12-36 months’ worth of historical customer orders, inventory, and supplier orders from the client ERP system. The recommender algorithm provides a push-button answer to the demand forecasting problem.

Outcome

  • The solutions resulted in significant time and effort savings for the client. The overall time to plan supplier orders was cutdown from two (2) weeks to 30 minutes.
  • Client gained significant market share while its competitors did not proactively plan for post-covid changing market conditions regarding lead times and product demand
  • The entire process has been automated where client just needs to click on a button resulting in complete automation of the entire supplier ordering process
  • 32% reduction in stockout levels

eMoksha’s Steel Distribution expertise and solutions allow us to manage the entire life cycle of steel distribution from supplier ordering, inventory management, customer orders, shipping, invoicing, payments, and reporting/analytics. Since we implemented eMoksha’s steel distribution solutions, our day-to-day operations have gone through complete automation and resulting transformation. We have realized significant time and effort savings in back-office operations and have eliminated several bottlenecks in warehouse operations. Our business is growing fast and it would have been very challenging as a medium size business to keep up with the growth without investing in technology and automation which has allowed us to do more with less. eMoksha continues to provide us with steel distribution-specific data-driven systems and automation tools which are driving our revenue growth, process efficiencies, and cost savings.

Melissa Supler
Chief Operating Officer, Lyman Steel

Want to know more about our demand planning?

eMoksha Demand Planning is a cloud-based service that utilizes AI algorithms, machine learning, and historical data to predict future inventory needs of steel distributors based on demand history, seasonality, and steel mill order cycles.

Know More
Contact Us