Customer Story
West Virginia Electric Supply Cuts Dead Stock by up to 80% and Reclaims Control of Its Inventory
Overview
West Virginia Electric Supply, an eight-branch electrical distributor running Eclipse, used Blue Ridge to centralize inventory decisions and replace daily manual reviews with exception-based buying. Over four years, dead stock fell 70-80%, service levels reached 96.3%, inventory dropped nearly 20%, and GMROI rose 24%.
Industry
Electrical
Solutions
Demand Planning
Replenishment
Strategic Success Practice
Challenges
Each of eight branches managed its own inventory, often on instinct or outdated parameters.
West Virginia Electric Supply is the kind of company customers trust without thinking: eight branches, deep product expertise, and decades of serving contractors and industrial clients across the region. From the outside, the business looked rock-solid. Inside, the challenges were mounting.
Each branch managed its own inventory. Some adjusted reorder points based on instinct. Others inherited parameters that had not been touched in years. Transfers happened constantly without a unifying strategy.
Eclipse offered basic forecasting, but no one believed it could handle growing complexity.
“Our ERP had forecasting, I’ll call it forecasting because that’s what they call it,” says Robert Hensley, Product Manager, with a laugh. “It wasn’t great, but it was functional.” Functional was no longer enough. Buyers could not see demand patterns clearly, and no one trusted the ERP to keep pace as the business grew.
Buyers lost the first three to four hours of every day to manual reviews.
Before Blue Ridge, the first three or four hours of Robert’s day disappeared into a maze of spreadsheets, Eclipse screens, and guesswork. Every day he moved line by line through SKUs just to make sure nothing slipped. The work was heavy and the results were unpredictable.
The company was not struggling because people were not doing their jobs. It was struggling because they were doing those jobs without the right system behind them.
More than $1 million in dead stock collected quietly in corners of the business.
Dead stock, more than $1 million worth, sat unnoticed across the branch network while cash stayed tied up. Leadership could feel the company’s growth pressing against a ceiling they had not built but could no longer ignore.
Challenge 01
Decentralized, instinct-driven purchasing
Challenge 02
Forecasting that could not keep up
Challenge 03
Hours lost to manual reviews
Challenge 04
Over $1 million in dead stock
Solutions
One centralized view of demand, with exception-based purchasing and coaching from Blue Ridge
Blue Ridge brought inventory decisions into one view, replacing branch-by-branch reorder points and unplanned transfers with centralized planning.
West Virginia Electric Supply is the kind of company customers trust without thinking: eight branches, deep product expertise, and decades of serving contractors and industrial clients across the region. From the outside, the business looked rock-solid. Inside, the challenges were mounting.
Each branch managed its own inventory. Some adjusted reorder points based on instinct. Others inherited parameters that had not been touched in years. Transfers happened constantly without a unifying strategy.
Forecasts reflect consumption, lead times, and demand patterns at the branch level, so buyers plan each item by how it behaves in each branch.
“Our ERP had forecasting, I’ll call it forecasting because that’s what they call it,” says Robert Hensley, Product Manager, with a laugh. “It wasn’t great, but it was functional.” Functional was no longer enough. Buyers could not see demand patterns clearly, and no one trusted the ERP to keep pace as the business grew.
Purchasing evolved from a daily firefight into a predictable workflow. Robert now spends about 90 minutes reviewing what needs attention.
Before Blue Ridge, the first three or four hours of Robert’s day disappeared into a maze of spreadsheets, Eclipse screens, and guesswork. Every day he moved line by line through SKUs just to make sure nothing slipped. The work was heavy and the results were unpredictable.
The company was not struggling because people were not doing their jobs. It was struggling because they were doing those jobs without the right system behind them.
With hands-on guidance from the Blue Ridge team, implementation felt more like coaching than setup.
Dead stock, more than $1 million worth, sat unnoticed across the branch network while cash stayed tied up. Leadership could feel the company’s growth pressing against a ceiling they had not built but could no longer ignore.
Solution 01
Centralized planning across eight branches
Solution 02
Branch-level demand accuracy
Solution 03
Exception-based workflow
Solution 04
Ongoing advisory support
Results
70–80% less dead stock, 96.3% service levels, and inventory that works for the business
70-80%
Reduction in dead stock
96.3%
Service level, with fill rate and customer satisfaction up
The results kept building instead of peaking early. Dead stock fell 70–80%, translating to major cost savings and improved cash flow. Service levels rose to 96.3%, fill rate improved, and customer satisfaction grew. Inventory fell nearly 20% while profitability surged: GMROI is up 24%, turns are up 37%, and cash flow is stronger. These are not one-time gains. All figures are key metric averages over four years, and the improvements continue to compound.
The team also gained scalability: quick training, easy coverage, and far less operational strain. Robert no longer starts his mornings buried in spreadsheets. He spends about 90 minutes reviewing what needs attention, and by 9:00 AM he is working on something that moves the business forward. David no longer worries that stock is sitting in the wrong corner of the business. Training new staff is easier, vacation coverage is seamless, and branches trust the process.
The biggest win is confidence. For the first time in years, West Virginia Electric Supply knew its inventory was working for the business, not against it.
"The goal wasn’t to just reduce inventory. It was to have what we need, when we need it, for our customers. And that’s exactly what Blue Ridge helped us do."
David Mays
VP of Operations
From a peer’s story to a new language of inventory
The search was not dramatic. There was no major crisis and no customer loss, just a conversation with a distributor that had faced the same challenges and come out the other side. The part that stuck was not a statistic. A product manager there told them he “would wake up in the middle of the night because the inventory numbers were dropping so fast.” Not from fear, but from relief. “That was the moment we realized,” says David Mays, VP of Operations, “if they can get that kind of impact, so can we.” The team was not looking for fancy dashboards. They wanted clarity, control, and a way to make decisions based on real demand, not habit.
Robert says the hardest part of the transition was the mental shift, not training or process change. “For years I thought of an item as one SKU. Blue Ridge made me realize it’s actually eight SKUs, each with its own behavior. That was a big leap.” Branch managers felt the change too. They were used to calling the shots, and letting a system take the wheel was not easy. But as the weeks went on, skeptics became believers. The forecasts made sense, transfers dropped, stockouts eased, and decisions became grounded in facts rather than intuition.
“Centralizing inventory was tough at first,” David says. “But Blue Ridge made it easy to adjust and let the data guide decisions.” He adds that the support was a big part of it: “Their support has been top-notch. We learned a lot, and fast.”
Looking Ahead
Four years in, still finding new efficiencies
“How much longer can you afford to wait?”
The change is so embedded now that it is easy to forget what life was like before. Four years in, West Virginia Electric Supply is still gaining traction, still improving, still finding new efficiencies, and still expanding what is possible.
The final takeaway is not a number or a ratio. It is a question David now poses to other distributors.
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 Strategic Success Practice 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.