Fred Aldous Masters the Art of Easy Inventory Planning

“The time saving is dramatic. It’s massive. We’re saving hours and hours and hours every week” – Paul Walker, Managing Director, Fred Aldous 

When you’re planning inventory for just a handful of products, a spreadsheet and a bit of guesswork might get you by.  

But what about when you’re a multi-million-pound retailer placing orders for 30,000 different products from 200 different suppliers?  

That’s the reality for arts and crafts retailer, Fred Aldous.  

The family-run business, established 128 years ago in Manchester and now with stores in Leeds and Sheffield, stocks a huge range of products, including paints, pens, stationery, craft kits as well as cards, wrapping paper and gifts. 

The secret to Fred Aldous’s seamless inventory planning and purchasing? Inventory Planner by Sage.  

As a top-rated inventory planning app, Inventory Planner offers accurate, up-to-date demand forecasting which factors in supplier timescales, seasonality and promotions alongside historical sales data. 

These forecasts are turned into simple buying recommendations which the whole team can use to know exactly what to order and when. Suppliers can be managed in one centralized dashboard and the placing of POs can be automated.  

The software slots seamlessly into your existing tech stack – which for Fred Aldous includes Shopify and Cin7. Implementation is fast, hassle-free and led by experts. 

Crafting the ultimate solution 

“Inventory Planner is simply the best in the business when it comes to handling inventory,” says Fred Aldous’s Managing Director, Paul Walker.  

“None of the other software solutions we’ve tried – and we’ve tried lots – grasp the intricacies of placing large volume orders with multiple different suppliers.  

“Seriously, other solutions just don’t have the functionality – for instance, they expect you to add product lines individually. Inventory Planner stands out from the crowd as the only software that properly grasps the issues larger retailers are facing and provides a real solution.  

“Before Inventory Planner, placing just one PO with one supplier would take an hour and a half. Now it’s done in about four clicks. We can order tens of thousands of products from 30 different suppliers within half an hour.  

“The time saving is dramatic. It’s massive. We’re saving hours every week. 

“Without it, we’d have easily had to hire an additional two full-time employees, just to stay on top of our inventory.” 

Picture perfect inventory planning 

With multiple bricks and mortar locations and a warehouse for online orders, Fred Aldous uses Inventory Planner to seamlessly handle location transfers and stock adjustments.  

As a seasonal business, it also relies on Inventory Planner’s trend analysis to maintain an optimal inventory and avoid stockouts and overstock, which can otherwise tie up all-important cash.  

The software’s highly customizable filters means the Fred Aldous team are able to get granular with their ordering and analysis.  

Paul says: “There’s a feature we especially love that lets you temporarily halt replenishment for a specific duration. We sell a lot of seasonal items, so that’s especially useful for avoiding overstock. For instance, we can tell it to pause replenishment of Christmas items until September and then automatically start including them in orders again.  

“We also like being able to set minimum or maximum order levels so that we can choose how much of a safety stock buffer we have. For best-selling items we like setting it to the maximum level because running out of stock would cost us thousands, so it’s not worth the risk. 

“It seamlessly connects all our sales channels and gives us a complete overview of all inventory in all locations, which is extremely useful.” 

A palette of possibilities 

“If you’ve got 10,000 SKUs or more, you’ve got to be using software like Inventory Planner if you want to be able to order inventory efficiently” – Paul Walker, Joint Managing Director, Fred Aldous 

With Inventory Planner at the heart of its tech stack, Fred Aldous can look to the future with confidence.  

Paul adds: “If you’ve got 10,000 SKUs or more, you’ve got to be using software like Inventory Planner if you want to be able to order inventory efficiently. 

“We now have the capability to efficiently manage tens of thousands of products seamlessly and to place orders with 200 suppliers in a fraction of the time it would take using a manual, spreadsheet-based approach or with other software. 

“With Inventory Planner, you’re always either saving time or you’re saving money.  

“It’s worth every penny. We wouldn’t be without it.” 

Want to draw on Fred Aldous’s success with Inventory Planner? Book a demo now.