ATLANTA, Dec. 17, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Blue Ridge, a leader in supply chain planning and pricing solutions, today announced a partnership with Affiliated Distributors (AD) to deliver its Supply Chain Planning solutions to its membership of independent distributors and best-in-class HVACR, plumbing, electrical and industrial suppliers across North America. Blue Ridge will be the exclusive provider of Supply Chain Planning and Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions for AD through the end of 2021.
AD is a member-owned organization with annual sales of $46 billion across nine industries and three countries. With more than 5,000 branches from 800-plus independently owned members, AD is North America’s largest marketing/buying group for construction and industrial supplies. In 2018, Frost & Sullivan recognized Blue Ridge as the Best Cloud-Native Supply Chain Planning Solution for Distributors.
“Blue Ridge has a tremendous track record for serving the unique supply chain planning needs of the distribution industry,” said David Hons, AD director of procurement. “Blue Ridge’s solutions are cloud-based and purpose-built for distributors, solving many of the industry’s key inventory planning challenges like seasonal, intermittent and slow-moving items.”
Blue Ridge’s cloud-native Supply Chain Planning (SCP) solution fully optimizes distributor inventory levels for both profit and desired service levels to the end customer. The solution automatically adapts to market trends and alerts users to suggested purchase order quantities, transfer orders, and demand shifts based on the latest data. Blue Ridge Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is a next-generation S&OP solution that synchronizes revenue, demand supply and financial plans to craft one, consensus operational plan that ensures accountability across functional silos of the business.
In February, Blue Ridge released the 2020 State of Wholesale Distribution Supply Chain Report, which revealed a clear market need for solutions that streamline forecasting processes and reduce uncertainty. The Company also held a webinar for HVAC and Hardgoods distributors in November 2020 that shared three “war stories” of distributors – the metrics they achieved and how they used these technologies to get a handle on overstock, stockouts and inventory planning efficiency. The replay is available here.
“AD is the organization which all distributors look to for guidance in finding the best technology solutions to improve revenue and increase efficiency across an organization,” said Jeff Jenkins, Blue Ridge chief revenue officer. “The Blue Ridge platform takes into account unpredictable customer behavior, enabling these companies to make a comprehensive market assessment, accurately predicting customer demand with more certainty and speed far beyond what an ERP can do.”
About Blue Ridge
Blue Ridge Supply Chain Planning and Price Optimization solutions empower distributors and retailers to tap into undiscovered margin through enterprise-wide inventory intelligence, automation and synchronization. Blue Ridge uniquely combines demand forecasting with pricing strategy, so that businesses can proactively understand the unpredictable and allocate the right inventory, right-priced across the entire mix, to accelerate top- and bottom-line results. In a world where the only constant is change, Blue Ridge provides more certainty, more speed and more assurance, so companies can see the why behind the buy and respond faster to the unexpected. That’s why major retailers and distributors rely on Blue Ridge for a more foreseeable future. For more information, go to www.blueridgeglobal.com.
Media Contact:
Will Haraway
Backbeat Marketing
william@backbeatmarketing.com
404.593.8320