CLAYTON BOARDMAN – 
Director of at Sales Reliance Worldwide Corporation

Clayton began his career with The Home Depot on the Inventory Planning & Replenishment team after graduating from Auburn University with a degree in Supply Chain Management. He spent three and a half years with The Home Depot before joining RWC, where he now serves as Director of Sales. He has spent the last six years with RWC and enjoys working in an innovative, rapid growth environment. Established in 1949, Reliance Worldwide Corporation (RWC) has grown to become a world leader in water control, measurement, infrastructure, products and services, supplying hot water systems to manufacturers, plumbing distributors, government bodies, and other major industries. www.rwc.com.

Staff: Clayton, you’ve been with RWC for over 6 years now. How would you describe the culture of supply management at RWC (innovative, exploratory, team-oriented, streamlined, highly-responsive, etc.)?

Clayton: The RWC approach to supply chain management is team-oriented and continuously improving. It all starts with good communication, nothing is a substitute for good communication and the best process will fail without it. At RWC, we’ve recently created a dedicated S&OP team and are implementing a new forecasting tool to help improve our forecasting and inventory management. Utilizing the data available from our customers and a team approach has historically allowed us to do a lot with little system capability, so we are excited about where having a dedicated forecasting system will take us. Accelerated analytics has helped us up our POS reporting game, but POS data has always been an integral part of our supply management process.

Staff: RWC is a self-described global family of brands, each having its own unique supply needs. How does your team leverage POS reporting to optimize operations (weekly team reviews of the numbers, audits of other systems, etc.)?

Clayton: We are a global manufacturer with operations in the US, EMEA, and APAC, we leverage POS data to develop our forecasts which feeds into our MRP system to drive production globally.

Staff: We’re always interested in which metrics your team finds itself keeping an eye on most – certainly this will change season to season, but do you have any top-of-mind that are most insightful to you personally (YOY sales, etc.)?

Clayton: 
We track comp sales year over year in a variety of ways, we look at last 4, 8, 13, 52 weeks versus same periods prior year, this allows us to see not only the comp % but the trends. Another key metric we utilize to measure inventory is Weeks of Supply, we use the last six weeks of sales and divide by OH inventory this gives us a good trend line on where our customer’s inventory levels are moving and alert us when further investigation is needed. Weeks of supply gives us insight into inventory depth and not just an in-stock % that measures to 1 or 2 units.

Staff: Along those lines, working within teams… everyone has their set of go-to numbers. Does your team customize EDI 852 or POS reports to review team KPIs?

Clayton: We find ourselves utilizing the data cube most frequently to develop reporting for our team’s needs. What we love about Accelerated Analytics is it allows us to transform the data into our internal language or our customers all in one platform without doing countless lookups and spending all our time working the data versus interpreting and learning from the data. The other great thing is how repeatable the reports are, once you develop a great report, you can simply refresh it each week and not waste time re-creating the same thing each week.

Staff: There are a lot of dynamic and shifting factors in our world today that affect global supply chain (climate, geo-political shifts, technology disruption and so on). Responsiveness must certainly be a part in planning out as far ahead as possible, but what are your tools of the trade insight-wise?

Clayton:
Knowing your numbers and having ways to access the data you need quickly is critical to be responsive to changes in demand. One area we focus on this time of year is the weather, being a Pipe & Fitting manufacturer we can see some significant spikes if sustained freezing occurs in southern parts of the country. We’ve developed a forward-looking weather analytics tools that give us advanced notice of potential freezes and we can utilize the Data Cube to pull inventory and make recommendations to our customers on where inventory needs are ahead of the event occurring to allow us to capture more demand and reduce out of stock duration.

Staff: You’re also a RIBB reader yourself. Any particular section or sections that peak your interest the most?

Clayton:
I enjoy looking at the multi-vendor data section in the RIBB report.

Staff: Do you have any supply chain or retail analytics insights for the community here – anything that you’ve seen that we should be keeping an eye out for in the coming year (specifically, any unique insights that you and/or your team has been keeping an eye on over the last year that you’re willing to share with the community)?

Clayton:
If you’re not utilizing Accelerated Analytics from the top of the organization down you’re missing out on opportunities to save time and grow your business!