Groundwork, LBM Software for Inventory & Planning
Built for LBM Buyers, Essential for LBM Executives
Never again will we have all of our critical commodity purchasing information in one guy’s head, spreadsheets, and notebooks.
– Multi-location Lumberyard President
How do I replace decades of expertise in my retiring buyer?
There are two parts to this increasingly common problem for lumber yards.
- First, how do you keep the knowledge from walking out the door?
- Second, how do I attract new talent into this industry with old tools?
Groundwork creates a systematic approach to buying – a shared strategy among executives and buyers. Implemented before the buyer retires, the nuance of experience can be built into your purchasing algorithms. Implemented when a new buyer starts, historic data plus our insights for deep dive analysis of your history, trends, and our decades of supply chain experience become your guide. And we meet with your buyers weekly to assist in their planning. Attracting new talent requires modern tools. Most college graduates are young, and the majority are women. Hand these new talented individuals a yellow legal pad, a telephone, and an outdated ERP, and you’ll lose them before they start. Hand them intuitive visuals tools like Groundwork for planning, and Marketplace for buying, and you’ll attract and retain the next generation of talent.
Groundwork – Visual Inventory Analysis and Purchase Planning
Yesler Groundwork is powerful LBM software giving buyers the tools to analyze inventory positions over time and plan purchases looking forward. Using historical and current sales trend data, Groundwork provides graphical views into future inventory levels and the purchases required to keep a target level of inventory on-hand.
Groundwork elegantly handles needs unique to lumber and building materials, such as integrated analysis for organizations with multiple ERP systems and analysis of inventory for interchangeable SKUs. Buyers can quickly filter by product families or specific products, by location or a combination of multiple locations, and appropriately handle reload locations.
Executives also use Groundwork to access inventory levels and purchase plans in easy to understand charts, gaining visibility into factors that drive working capital requirements and commodity price risk.
My ERP already does this, right?
We hear that regularly. Our response – let’s share side by side, your ERP and Groundwork. Your ERP was selected for finances, transactions, and recording inventory. Groundwork sits on top of your ERP data and was built for the specific needs of commodity buyers to plan and execute buying. Plus, Groundwork gives executives full visibility into purchase plans, inventory levels, and inventory targets. This visibility pulls back the veil of opaque purchasing and inventory planning inherent to the ERP plus paper and pencil process of many buyers, creating a robust system that builds confidence across the organization.
Ready to See What Groundwork Can Do?
Groundwork Features for Buyers
Quickly Identify Lumber Needs
Much of the power of Yesler Groundwork comes from the presentation of data in interactive graphs that give quick insight into inventory requirements in the future. For each SKU, the buyer can quickly see current inventory, forecasted sales for each upcoming week, and the resulting expected inventory balance. The software identifies the week at which inventory drops below a target threshold, and the quantity of the SKU that needs to be purchased for delivery to stay within the desired range. Using the graphical presentation of the upcoming needs, the buyer can quickly create a purchase plan to meet those needs, building the trucks or railcars to create purchase orders for delivery in those future weeks. These features save a lot of time over ERP suggested PO solutions and help to keep inventory on hand without over stocking.
Reduce Working Capital Requirements
Commodity lumber is a huge source of working capital requirements for lumberyards. At Yesler, we have seen instances where a lumberyard may target two to four weeks of on-the-ground lumber inventory, but actually have as much as fifteen weeks of inventory in stock. This often occurs during peak building season when prices tend to be highest, leading to large increases in working capital requirements and also vastly increasing risk in the case of commodity price declines. Groundwork establishes clear upper and lower targets for inventory based on past usage resulting in clear identification of overstocking situations. This helps buyers to avoid situations where they purchase inventory above the upper target unless there is a strategic decision to do so by management.
Manage Internal Distribution between Multiple Yards and Reloads
A common challenge for multi-yard operators is controlling overall commodity lumber inventory vs inventory at each yard. By providing easy to use views of total inventory as well as inventory at each lumberyard location, Groundwork facilitates and helps organize transfers between yards to rebalance inventory. Groundwork is also designed to provide the same functionality to coordinate distribution from an internal reload to the yards in need of replenishment of products.
Execute Groundwork Purchase Plans Using Yesler Marketplace
Once a purchase plan has been created within Groundwork, the buyer can easily request quotes from suppliers for the required truckloads or railcars using Yesler Marketplace. This process of analyze-plan-execute creates a closed-loop purchasing process. The buyer then has the ability at any time to see on-order quantities for future delivery in Groundwork as well as the purchase order and sales confirmations associated with any orders that have not yet arrived. This saves time in researching late deliveries, helping to ensure out-of-stock situations do not occur.
LBM-Specific Use Cases for Multi-Yard Operations
These two examples come directly from Yesler Groundwork users applying this LBM software to use cases that are not supported within any existing ERP.
Consolidating data across multiple data sources and yard locations.
Consolidating data across multiple data sources and yard locations.
The problem: Due to product availability shortages or a change in preferred suppliers, two different SKUs were used in the past for products that have been used interchangeably by contractor customers. To forecast upcoming needs, the user needs to combine past usage for both products as well as the combined on-hand inventory for both products.
Using Groundwork, the buyer can easily combine the two products to look at the usage and inventory needs for both together. This makes decisions regarding upcoming purchases much easier and has the side benefit of providing flexibility in purchasing when alternative, interchangeable products are available.
