Challenge
Sumatec is a Colombian industrial distributor serving categories where product availability is critical: tools, hardware, MRO products, safety equipment, electrical materials, and industrial supplies. Its national network includes 80 warehouses, more than 50,000 SKUs, and over 3 million inventory records that feed the planning process.
Before SOBERAN SAI, demand planning depended on a legacy system and extensive spreadsheets. Planners had to export, reconcile, and interpret large files to decide which SKUs to buy, which products to transfer from another warehouse, and which records to exclude because they had no demand.
The implementation had to work with Sumatec’s actual planning data: product code and name, destination warehouse, available inventory, average daily consumption, coverage days, replenishment frequency, lead time, minimum order quantity, packaging multiple, supplier NIT, pending customer orders, in-transit inventory, product line, and source type.
Solution
SOBERAN built SAI as a custom demand-planning system. Planners work from one replenishment view where SKUs, warehouses, demand signals, inventory, pending orders, in-transit stock, purchasing rules, and transfer options appear together instead of across exported files and spreadsheets.
The data flow combines information from Jaivana, Sumatec’s ERP, with product and catalog context from the Magento PIM, warehouse metadata, demand history, inventory levels, and replenishment parameters. Millions of records become a model the team can use to evaluate every SKU-and-warehouse combination without rebuilding the dataset by hand.
The recommendation engine analyzes each product and warehouse combination, excludes products with no average daily demand, and calculates need from consumption, lead time, target coverage, safety stock, current inventory, pending orders, and in-transit stock. It then adjusts quantities to minimum-order and packaging rules.
Before creating a purchase order, SAI checks other warehouses for safe surplus of the same SKU. If internal inventory can cover the need, it recommends a transfer. If not, it recommends a purchase. When both are required, it creates a split recommendation with quantities assigned to each source warehouse.
Results
Sumatec’s planners now work from one demand-planning system instead of using Excel as their primary decision tool. Each warehouse view can contain thousands of planning records, while the national model shows where inventory can move before the company makes another purchase.
Approved recommendations are sent to Sumatec’s ERP as grouped purchase orders and warehouse transfers. SAI also creates a traceability record for every transaction, including the original recommendation, approval status, manual adjustments, outbound requests, received responses, document numbers, the person responsible for execution, and the submission time.
The result goes beyond a cleaner planning screen. It creates a controlled operating cycle: data arrives from the ERP, PIM, warehouses, and demand and inventory sources; SOBERAN calculates what to buy or transfer; the team reviews and approves; the ERP receives the execution documents; and the audit trail records every change.
- warehouses across the country
- 80
- inventory records processed
- 3 million+
- SKUs managed
- 50,000+