customer story
West Virginia Electric Supply Cuts Dead Stock by up to 80% and Reclaims Control of Its Inventory
Key Stats
Overview
When Robert Hensley, Product Manager at West Virginia Electric Supply walks into the office each morning, he knows exactly how his day will start, and more importantly, how it won’t. Before Blue Ridge, the first three or four hours of his day disappeared into a maze of spreadsheets, Eclipse screens, and guesswork. Now? He spends about 90 minutes reviewing what needs attention, and by 9:00 AM, he’s already working on something that moves the business forward.
That shift didn’t happen overnight. It began with a hard realization: the company wasn’t struggling because people weren’t doing their jobs, it was struggling because they were doing their jobs with the wrong tools.
- Company: WV Electric Supply
- Vertical: Electrical Distribution
- ERP: Eclipse
- Warehouse locations: 8
- Blue Ridge Modules: Forecasting, Replenishment
Challenge
- Decentralized purchasing
- Outdated forecasting
- 3–4 hrs/day manual buying
- $1M+ dead stock
Solution
- Centralized planning
- Branch-level demand accuracy
- Exception-based workflow
- Ongoing advisory
Result
- 80% less dead stock
- 20% lower inventory
- 24% GMROI lift
- 37% more turns
- Buying time cut in half
- Service level → 96.3%
The Weight of a Growing Operation
West Virginia Electric Supply is the kind of company customers trust without thinking. Eight branches, deep product expertise, decades of serving contractors and industrial clients across the region. From the outside, the business looked rock-solid. Inside, though, the challenges were mounting.
Each branch managed its own inventory. Some adjusted reorder points based on instinct. Others inherited parameters that hadn’t been touched in years. Transfers happened constantly without a unifying strategy. And while Eclipse offered basic forecasting, no one believed it could truly keep up with the company’s growing complexity.
“Our ERP had forecasting, I’ll call it forecasting because that’s what they call it,” Robert says with a laugh. “It wasn’t great, but it was functional.” Functional was no longer enough.
Dead stock, more than $1 million worth, collected quietly in corners of the business. Buyers couldn’t see demand patterns clearly. And every day, Robert sank into the same routine of manual reviews, moving line by line through SKUs just to make sure nothing slipped.
The work was heavy. The results were unpredictable. And leadership could feel the company’s growth pressing against a ceiling they hadn’t built but could no longer ignore.
The Moment Everything Shifted
The search for a solution wasn’t dramatic. No major crisis, no customer loss. Just a conversation with a distributor who’d faced the same challenges and had come out on the other side.
The part that stuck wasn’t a statistic. It was a story. A product manager told them he “would wake up in the middle of the night because the inventory numbers were dropping so fast.”
Not from fear. From relief. “That was the moment we realized,” says VP of Operations David Mays,
“If they can get that kind of impact, so can we.”
The team wasn’t looking for fancy dashboards or flashy tech. They wanted clarity. Control. A way to make decisions based on real demand, not habit.
Customer Stories
Hear from the businesses making every decision count
“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
"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%
“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
“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
