Strong international growth brought new challenges for Afix Group. Active in the rental and sale of scaffolding equipment across more than 20 countries, the company had operated for years with a highly decentralized supply chain model.
Forecasting was managed locally in Excel, inventory management was largely reactive, and production planning lacked sufficient coordination across countries and business entities.
What had once worked well within a typical SME structure increasingly struggled to support the complexity of an international organization.
No single source of truth for demand and supply
Local sales entities made largely autonomous decisions regarding ordering and inventory build-up. Little consideration was given to available production capacity, open orders or stock in other countries.
Forecasting followed no standardized approach. Each country worked in its own way, without shared forecasting logic or central coordination.
For production sites, it became increasingly difficult to determine the right priorities. Open orders continued to accumulate, and the supply chain became increasingly reactive rather than proactive.
A single integrated planning approach
Together with valueXstream, Afix fundamentally redesigned its supply chain operations.
The focus was not on implementing new software, but on establishing a single integrated planning process within the existing SAP Business One environment.
Inventory management and planning were centralized within a single global supply chain structure, with clear responsibilities and a single source of truth for demand, inventory and capacity.
In addition, a rolling forecast process was introduced for each country. Forecasts were built using historical data, market insights and sales input, and were aligned monthly across sales, supply chain and production.
Production and shipping were synchronized through a central master production schedule. Local orders were grouped together, allowing the organization to respond more flexibly to fluctuations in demand.
Greater control, less waste
The new approach brought greater predictability across the entire supply chain.
By consolidating demand globally, safety stock levels could be calculated more accurately, significantly reducing excess central inventory. At the same time, service levels improved through more stable production planning and shorter lead times.
The transformation also required organizational changes. Forecasting and planning became embedded within the organization, supported by KPIs and clear service-level agreements between countries and customers.
In addition, SAP Business One was reconfigured to support the new planning logic, eliminating the need for an additional planning tool.
A scalable foundation for continued growth
What began as a planning challenge ultimately evolved into a fully integrated supply chain transformation.
Today, Afix Group benefits from greater inventory control, improved alignment between demand and production, and a scalable foundation for further international expansion — achieved not through additional planning software, but through smart process design within SAP.
