Case Study: Connect Education & Care achieves proactive, accurate supply chain planning and $2M+ inventory reduction with ToolsGroup SO99+

Connect Education & Care - Customer Case Study

Connect Education & Care, a leading education supplies wholesaler that serves 30,000 customers with 40,000 products, faced acute supply chain stress after acquiring The Consortium: multi-site complexity, highly seasonal demand, frequent SKU churn, and a spreadsheet-based planning process that couldn’t produce statistical forecasts or translate business plans into operational actions. To address this, Connect Education & Care selected ToolsGroup and its SO99+ planning software.

ToolsGroup implemented SO99+ and went live in just three months, delivering bottom-up, item- and location-level forecasts, fixing master-data issues, and enabling proactive exception management. As a result, Total Order Perfection rose by 5 percentage points, stock availability stabilized at 98% (up from the low 90s), inventory fell by more than $2 million and is on track to exceed a 20% reduction target, forecast accuracy improved by up to 10 points, and supplier performance moved from under 50% to above 80%.

Connect Education & Care

Adam Henry

Head of Supply Chain Planning