Gerab National optimises stock replenishment schedule in real-time

Visualizing large volumes of stock data with quick turnaround time

For over 35 years, Gerab National Enterprises LLC is a stockist and supplier of pipes, fittings, flanges, stud bolts, valves, gaskets, and other bulk material worldwide. Based in Jebel Ali Free Zone in Dubai, UAE, Gerab has associate offices in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, China, India and the USA.

The company’s clients are mainly in industries such as oil and gas, power generation, water desalination, petrochemical process, mining, construction and ship-building. With stocks spread over 250,000 square meters and its strategic location in Dubai, Gerab caters to customers from over 45 countries.

Faced with stocking challenges

The accumulated experience of managing bulk material supplies for projects and day-to-day requirements has made Gerab the leading stockist in the region.

The company understands the importance of quality and has been dealing only with approved international manufacturers within each product class. Committed to providing the highest value proposition to its clients, Gerab adopts international best practices in integrating the piping supply for the process, power and energy-related industries.

Gerab manages largest stock inventory of up to 70,000 ton of materials in the Middle East, the company receives tons of stock data on daily basis. While Gerab already operates on the most advanced ERP systems that create a reliable and efficient platform for transaction, inventory and product planning, it still requires a system that provides statistical analytical tool that can enable short turnaround time to achieve client requirements in a consistent and timely manner.

“For more than three decades, Gerab’s brand image in the industry has been synonymous with trust, quality and reliability in the steel piping application business. We are committed to be the leader and provide materials on time from to our customers” said K Srinivasan, Senior Vice President (ICT), Gerab National Enterprises LLC.

Analytics Journey with SAS

The SAS Visual Analytics solution was easily integrated within Gerab’s existing systems across finance, commercial, procurement and inventory. With over a month after implementing SAS Visual Analytics, the solution facilitated in visualizing large volumes of stock data with quick turnaround time, resulting to the company’s greater visibility in their business.

The solution has allowed Gerab to generate informative reports that are backed up with strong data visualizations. These reports, connected to the company’s database, demonstrate a good picture of Gerab’s current stock status as well as generate historical records and predict future trends of customer demands.

“In addition, SAS Visual Analytics is able to paint a big picture of the overall state of affairs allowing C-level executives a bird’s-eye view within the company. The results are very helpful in making top-level business decisions and providing better customer experience,” said Srinivasan.

As a leading stockist in the region, it is important for Gerab to reduce gaps between demand and supply by allocating resources more effectively. The use of SAS Visual Analytics allowed the company to streamline and achieve greater visibility into their business drivers as well as consolidate their product inventory with a single view via stock item category, geography, location and segmental dimensions. Such itemized inventory within Gerab increased drastically after implementing SAS Visual Analytics.

Through SAS Visual Analytics, Gerab, working with large amount of datasets, has allowed to find patterns using fast and powerful visualizations. The solution can also work with locally-imported datasets that encouraged its users to further explore and analyse their own data sets.