{"id":90556,"date":"2025-07-28T14:12:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T11:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intellias.com\/?p=90556"},"modified":"2025-12-09T08:40:05","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T06:40:05","slug":"developing-a-digitalized-stock-management-system-for-a-home-improvement-retailer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/intellias.com\/digitalized-stock-management-system-for-home-improvement-retailer\/","title":{"rendered":"Developing a Digitalized Stock Management System for a Home Improvement Retailer"},"content":{"rendered":"
As part of a larger retail system upgrade, long-time client Travis Perkins asked Intellias to build a digital stock management system. The award-winning solution unifies inventory data into a single source, ensuring it has the correct number of products along with location information. We also created a suite of web applications called the Branch Toolkit. Travis Perkins associates can access the toolkit on mobile devices with Zebra scanners. The Branch Toolkit includes product inventory management and location maintenance applications, which branch associates use to find products in stores. Because it serves as a user interface for the branch\u2019s backend systems, the Branch Toolkit also connects to the company\u2019s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and other microservices via a GraphQL API.<\/p>\n
The Branch Toolkit was a huge success. Using it, Travis Perkins greatly improved their inventory accuracy and substantially reduced the time branch associates spent counting products. Customers also expressed satisfaction with the retail<\/a> solution, which won the Best Digital Transformation award from Contentsquare for improvements in operational efficiency.<\/p>\n Travis Perkins has been a leading supplier of building materials and services to trade customers for over 200 years. The company has over 550 branches, including more than 150 Benchmarx showrooms, and employs 8,400 associates.<\/p>\n In a busy multi-channel retail environment, accurately managing inventory is essential. However, stock management at building supplier Travis Perkins was not keeping pace with sales. Reliant on paper for processing orders in the yard and for taking branch inventory, the company frequently had stock issues that slowed them down. The main challenges were:<\/p>\n Taking inventory at Travis Perkins was a manual, time-consuming process. Before system modernization, branch associates printed inventories from their ERP system. They would then have to track down products, hand-count them, mark their paper list, and reconcile the inventory in the system with the handwritten numbers.<\/p>\n These inefficiencies in stock management led to other business concerns, from inaccurate replenishment cycles to delayed order fulfillment. They also resulted in unhappy customers. Travis Perkins needed a centralized, real-time inventory management solution that could eliminate redundancies and improve stock visibility across branches.<\/p>\n We developed a custom solution for Travis Perkins to modernize many of the company\u2019s digital systems, including a modular set of mobile web applications that are integrated into the Branch Toolkit. Running on AWS and managed in Kubernetes, the system powers a set of backend microservices connected by GraphQL APIs to improve the company\u2019s data management strategy<\/a>. These microservices quickly make the same data available to the company\u2019s frontend system, eCommerce websites, mobile applications, and backend office applications, such as the product information management system.<\/p>\nBusiness challenge<\/h2>\n
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Solution<\/h2>\n