How Southwest Traders Cut Inventory Days by 10 and Reached 99.95% Service Levels

A Manual Process Reaching Its Breaking Point

When Brad Smith, SVP of Procurement & Sales first stepped into the procurement role at Southwest Traders, he inherited a department that ran almost entirely by hand.

Buyers created purchase orders inside an old Mark Information Systems AS/400-based ERP. The system stored historical usage but provided no forecasting and no actual guidance. To build a PO, a buyer had to click into each item and type a number. Brad said, “You would literally just sit there going through screens one at a time. That’s all they did all week – build purchase orders.” Every SKU. Every week. Thousands of them. With 9 to 11 buyers on staff, PO creation filled the entire week. Once orders were built, a different group confirmed them, and the warehouse tracked them. No one had time for analysis, strategy, or planning. The strain showed up everywhere. Service level hovered around 97.2%, which didn’t sound terrible, until it cost Southwest Traders a contract with a large fast casual restaurant after repeated stockouts of core products.

Inventory was another issue. Days on hand (DOH) regularly sat in the high 20s and sometimes even higher during busy seasons. Aged inventory hit 16%, tying up cash and taking up space. Whole trailers were rented just to store slow movers.

And then came Panera Bread. To support the new business, Southwest Traders needed to onboard 78 new suppliers. Leadership budgeted one additional buyer. Brad knew immediately that the math didn’t work. The old process was exhausting the team, and growth would only magnify the problem.

Discovering Blue Ridge at Exactly the Right Moment

Blue Ridge wasn’t on Brad’s radar at first. He explored other solutions, some that looked promising, but nothing felt right. Either the functionality wasn’t strong enough or the vendors didn’t have meaningful customer bases. Then a new executive joined the company, someone who had used Blue Ridge previously. He encouraged Brad to take a look at Blue Ridge.

Once the conversations began, the turning point came quickly. Blue Ridge sent a Lifeline team member who was a former procurement manager to speak with Brad and show him the capabilities of Blue Ridge’s platform. This Lifeline team member had done Brad’s job. He knew the problems intimately and could demonstrate exactly how the software addressed them.

“I wasn’t talking to someone guessing about my problems. He had lived them. And he showed me how the tool handled the situations I dealt with every day.” I could say, ‘Here’s what happens to me,’ and he’d say, ‘Use this for that.’ He knew exactly how to solve the problems I was dealing with.” That made the decision clear and was the turning point for Brad.

Implementation wasn’t magic. Southwest Traders’ team thought they had done a thorough job preparing their data. Once they connected systems, they found mismatches between what the ERP showed and what Blue Ridge was seeing. Cleaning up item profiles, vendors, order cycles, and history took time.

To make the transition stick, Brad followed advice from his CIO: don’t do this alone. Brad recruited a Blue Ridge power user to join the team full-time. The entire group, buyers, the new super user, and the assigned Blue Ridge Lifeline rep, worked side-by-side in a large conference room until everything was stable. It wasn’t just data cleanup. It was a cultural reset, one that would shape the team’s work for years to come.

As the process matured, the team discovered they could do more with fewer resources, and redirect their time toward the strategic work that had previously been out of reach.

“Every Monday, we clear our demand exceptions and check due-for-service,” Brad says. “They’re done buying in three or four hours. Some of them are done in two. That used to take all week.” With replenishment largely automated, buyers suddenly had room to take on higher-value work, category management, sourcing, pricing, and tracking their own inbound loads. Work that previously required separate departments.

And while the team eventually shrank by roughly half, the company nearly doubled in size.

You would literally just sit there going through screens one at a time. That’s all they did all week – build purchase orders.

— Brad Smith, SVP of Procurement & Sales at Southwest Traders