BPEC are a provider of specialist industry recognised qualifications in the plumbing, renewable energy, gas and electrical training sector. Colleges, training centres, employers and learners utilise the training courses and learning manuals produced by BPEC and many of the courses within this sector use the manuals and workbooks for their students on a daily basis.
BPEC were facing the challenge of balancing order volumes efficiently and keeping track of unit price. Too few orders and the unit price wasn’t a commercially viable rate, too many and stock could sit for months on end. Some courses were incredibly popular, whereas others were more niche, and putting equal quantities of manuals into stock to achieve consistency of price meant stock levels were disproportionally high. Furthermore, when changes to courses were required large volumes of manuals had to be scrapped – a waste on many fronts.
Stock management was another challenge. With the stock being held off site and picked by their incumbent supplier, getting records to tally and performing stock checks was an admin nightmare! Many of the manual design’s had also become outdated, due to stock sitting with BPEC for long periods of time.
Our objective was fourfold:
The only way to tackle this challenge was to listen and make note. Our team spent a lot of time working together with BPEC to understand each and every frustration they were facing and in doing so, we were able to highlight some core issues that had not been considered. Holding such large volumes of training material meant that any changes to the course, however minor, would lead to a plethora of perfectly good stock being written off.
To kick start the project, we updated all of the artwork across the whole suite of manuals. This included a new finishing process for each manual which resulted in a slick set of refreshed branded manuals across BPEC’s full learning material offering. During our consultation, we explored ways in which we could create an even pricing matrix that considered the total overall manual usage and not just the individual manuals. This enabled us to provide effective scale that reduced annual spend significantly. There was very little historic data to work from, so together we drew up some assumptions that would allow for a monthly level of stock to be held for each manual, with a back-up of a 48-hour turnaround if any exceptional order requests for made.
Our primary focus for BPEC was to make the transition to us as seamless as possible, so we liaised directly with their incumbent supplier and moved all of their stock into our 27,000 sq. ft. warehouse. The stock was counted on receipt and the figures were confirmed back to BPEC in preparation for the first stock orders to be called off. Our ‘first in first out’ stock management process was ideal to ensure the older manuals were dispatched first, therefore making use of stock that was already paid for.
At the end of our first year working with BPEC they had made significant progress in reducing the overall cost of manuals to the business, and team administration costs were also reduced.
We provide monthly usage and movement reports which clearly demonstrate patterns of usage and seasonal impacts. These have enabled greater control of stock levels during peak and off-peak periods and allowed us to manage stock levels more dynamically, particularly during the pandemic.
BPEC training manuals are now all consistently on brand, stock levels are managed to a fine margin, maximising both on demand production and economies of scale, and stock usage is reported each month.
In addition, by adding unique barcodes to each manual we’re now able to trace each training manual to a college or user. This has further protected the intellectual property of BPEC which is contained within each manual.
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