Detailed Overview of the Business and Logistics Costs

GardenLife products are distributed through a large dealer network across Scandinavia and Germany, as well as through a number of webshops. Logistics operations are handled by an external provider, and with more than 4,000 product numbers and a very high number of daily deliveries, it is essential to be able to allocate costs to the correct transactions.

GardenLife is also a complex business that requires greater transparency across finance, inventory, customers, pipeline, and more.

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Subscription-Based Solution as a Key Advantage

“We had tried to implement a Business Intelligence solution a year ago, but we did not succeed with the supplier. It is a complex area to get started with, which is why we became particularly interested in Virkplan due to their subscription-based solution, where the entire core structure is already in place. This meant that we didn’t have to start from scratch, which was a major advantage. At the same time, their consultants have been very good at understanding our business and challenges, and were able to quickly develop a tailored solution with relevant reports and insights,”
says Frank Faurskov Hansen, Managing Director of GardenLife.

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Forecasts 9 Months Ahead Generate Savings

Garden products must be ordered from suppliers approximately nine months before they are delivered to stores, which places high demands on GardenLife’s ability to create reliable forecasts. With the Virkplan solution, GardenLife can generate demand forecasts and gain detailed insight into the historical performance of each individual product. Combined with their market knowledge, this enables them to place far more accurate orders than before.

“It is, of course, challenging to place orders so far in advance of presenting products to customers. But with our new BI solution, we have much greater confidence that our assortment will be right, which can save us significant costs in the long run. Overall, we have gained a much better overview of our business and insights we didn’t have before—and it saves us a great deal of time. All reports are generated automatically in the system, are predefined, and require no manual effort from us,”
explains Frank Faurskov Hansen.

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Predefined Customer Reports

“Another feature we greatly benefit from is the predefined customer reports. When meeting with customers, we want to present a report showing their total purchases, which products they buy, and when. Previously, this took a long time to extract from our accounting system and prepare in PowerPoint. We no longer do that—we simply request a report from the system,”
Frank Faurskov Hansen concludes.

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