Case Study: BC Transit achieves centralized warehouse consolidation and optimized parts management with Smart Software

BC Transit - Customer Case Study

BC Transit, which operates 1,185 buses across 130+ communities and handles 30,000 SKUs, faced a major challenge centralizing warehousing into a new Provincial Distribution Centre while maintaining a 95% service level. Manual, qualitative reorder-point setting could not scale for intermittent, sporadic parts demand, so BC Transit selected Smart Software’s Smart Inventory Planning & Optimization (Smart IP&O) — a cloud-based, probabilistic planning solution with automated data integration to JD Edwards — to rapidly establish optimal stocking policies.

Smart Software implemented an accelerated two-month rollout to automate Min/Max planning, consolidate demand across 35 locations, and move new items into production planning after three demand incidents. The solution enabled BC Transit to consolidate into a single facility (Nelson: “We could not have consolidated central distribution into one facility without Smart”), identify 3,000 additional SKUs needed, avoid incorrect forecasts, reduce order frequency, set optimal order quantities, and better balance inventory cost versus criticality — improving service-level-driven decision making and keeping buses on the road.

BC Transit

Eric Nelson

Director of Supply Services