Customer Story
Ace Hardware Chooses Blue Ridge Supply Chain Solutions
Challenges
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Eyebrow
Choosing and implementing
a new way forward
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Results
Time saved, inventory freed, confidence gained.
THe results folowed:
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I can load in an event and then next month go back and say, ‘You said we were going to see an uplift of 50%, but we only saw 5%.’ Next year, we’re smarter.”
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Managing dead stock more strategically
Dead stock hasn’t disappeared, but Jackson Systems now understands why it happens, and where they can influence it. The biggest driver is minimum order quantities: being forced to buy a full case when demand only supports a handful of units each year.
“Most of it comes back to MOQs,” Thelma says. With that visibility, the team can flag problem items earlier and take action. In some cases, it gives them leverage to go back to suppliers, renegotiate minimums, or consolidate buys across locations. In others, it informs smarter decisions about substitutions, stocking strategy, or when to carry an item at all. The result isn’t zero dead stock, but far fewer surprises and much more control.
With Blue Ridge, dormant and dying items surface early. The team now approaches suppliers with data, rebalances inventory where possible and avoids overcommitting on new items. For eCommerce, they test smaller initial buys and review performance quickly. “With the old system, we couldn’t see any of that,” she says. “Now we can.” They’re also exploring alternative sourcing strategies, including partnering with other distributors for slow-moving SKUs.
Looking ahead
A marathon, not a 5K
The Blue Ridge platformforces you to do the analytics, and that develops your team as problem solvers. Ifyou’releveragingit the right way and really digging into the alerts, it will change how you run your business.”
The most immediate change was time. What once took two to three days each week shrank to a few focused hours managing exceptions.
“Instead of reviewing every SKU, we were just reviewing the exceptions,” Thelma says. “It was such a relief.” With time freed up, buyers could finally understand why items were trending up or down, prepare for seasonal shifts and spend energy on forward-looking work instead of chasing lists.
What once took days each week, shrank to a few focused hours managing exceptions. “I can do this in like three hours,” she says. “Once we were comfortable managing by exception, what used to take us days turned into a focused, high-confidence review”. Visibility shifted how the business operated.
Customer Stories
Hear from the businesses making every decision count
“The ERP handles transactions. Blue Ridge handles the intelligence. That's the difference.”
Brad Smith
SVP, Procurement & Sales
Southwest Traders supplies national restaurant chains – Panera, Einstein, Starbucks, Panda Express – from a buying team of nine to eleven working on an AS/400 ERP. Blue Ridge cut order-build time from days to a few hours, held service levels at 99.95% across blue-chip customers, and let the company onboard new brands without adding to the planning team.
99.95%
Service level across national restaurant brands
~18.5
Days on hand
“Blue Ridge has been the most user-friendly, results-driven system that I've seen so far. Our whole planning and buying team absolutely loves it.”
Stephanie Hunn
Senior Manager, Planning
Before Blue Ridge, ISN was struggling to optimize fill rate and inventory turns simultaneously. The team evaluated multiple vendors and chose Blue Ridge for the onboarding, training, and ongoing system improvements baked into the relationship. They went live and saw measurable results from the first operating cycle forward – with the LifeLine team supporting every step.
~99%
Forecast accuracy maintained
50%
Improvement in fill rates over twelve months
“The goal wasn't just to reduce inventory. It was to have what we need, when we need it. That's exactly what Blue Ridge helped us do.”
David Mays
VP of Operations
West Virginia Electric Supply is an electrical distributor running eight branches on the Eclipse ERP. Centralizing inventory and moving to data-led replenishment let the team strip out the dead stock that had quietly accumulated for years – while service to contractors and customers held above 96% and the planning organization shifted from firefighting to forward-looking decisions.
70–80%
Reduction in dead stock
96.3%
Service level to contractors and customers
"Blue Ridge has the best interface and analytics you would need as a professional purchasing buyer"
Thelma Chavez
Director of Operations
Jackson Systems is a six-division HVAC distributor generating roughly $40M in annual revenue. Before Blue Ridge, the planning team reviewed every SKU manually – a process measured in days, not hours. Exception-based planning compressed that work, freed cash from excess stock, and pushed service levels into a range the team had never sustained before.
~$1M
Drop in inventory on hand
98.1%
Service level, up from 88%
Get Started
Build a supply chain that's ready for what's next
It’s never been easier to close the gap between your supply chain investment and your supply chain performance. Let us show you how.