Blue Ridge has announced that PACE Supply Corp., a leading wholesale distributor of plumbing supplies with more than 20 locations, has selected Blue Ridge's cloud-native planning solutions to optimize its inventory. PACE will leverage Blue Ridge's Supply Chain Planning and Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization (MEIO) solutions to implement a demand forecasting and seasonality plan to optimize its wholesale inventory of plumbing supplies, pipe, valves, fittings and more for customers in Northern California and Hawaii.

 

"The Blue Ridge system's ability to optimize our plumbing inventory based on seasonality enables us to reduce operational costs, increase service levels, maximize our working capital and assure product availability to our customers," said Kelly Hubley, vice president of purchasing, PACE Supply Group. "Blue Ridge's experience and success in wholesale distribution was vital to our decision to invest in this essential supply chain planning technology."

 

"Blue Ridge understands the unique challenges that plumbing and HVAC distributors face, given the highly erratic and disruptive nature of the industry and the high impact of seasonal buying patterns involved in a capacity-constrained multi-echelon distribution network," said Jim Byrnes, CEO, Blue Ridge. "Our Supply Chain Planning and MEIO solutions allow PACE to predict these costly disruptions and align inventory with great precision, delivering the best service to their customers at the lowest overall cost."

 

Blue Ridge MEIO and Supply Chain Planning solutions create fully configured orders and highly efficient inventory allocation across locations and channels. Orders are economically optimized to PACE Supply's goals for up to 24 months in advance. The system makes precise and automated order predictions without user intervention, while adhering to order schedules, constraints and SKU-level rounding requirements.

 

Blue Ridge MEIO solutions will also be a focus at the company's annual user conference, BLUEPRINT2020, to be held in Atlanta from April 26–28. BLUEPRINT is a practical, hands-on annual conference for supply chain leaders, managers and users of Blue Ridge solutions that includes more than 20 hours of training and development to improve inventory optimization for wholesale distribution plumbing as well as other industries.