“Availability was a challenge for us, but not at any cost. We needed a system that understood how our business really works, while remaining transparent and controllable. The goal was not simply better availability — it was better profitability.”
HoReCa distributor operating since 1998, serving more than 20,000 restaurant and hotel customers, with around 8,000 products, approximately 700 new products introduced every year and 7,500 m² of warehouse space. Tomgast operates from Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków and Gdańsk, with additional activity in the Czech Republic and international markets.
More precise availability by channel, better use of firm customer orders, and purchasing decisions that account simultaneously for transport, handling, warehouse, stockout and working-capital costs.
How Nadii helps a multichannel HoReCa distributor improve availability while optimising purchasing and logistics across very different suppliers and lead times
Tomgast does not have one type of demand that can be managed with one replenishment rule. The same product can be sold through its own e-commerce, marketplaces, affiliated distributors or larger one-off projects such as the opening of a hotel or restaurant. And these channels do not behave in the same way. An e-commerce customer expects the product to be available immediately. A project customer may order well in advance and accept a longer delivery time, but often expects the complete order to arrive together. Treating these demands as one averaged sales history would therefore lead to the wrong inventory decisions.
The supply side is just as varied. Tomgast works with suppliers from Europe and overseas, with very different lead times, reliability, purchasing conditions, packaging constraints and transport economics. For some products there may also be several sourcing options, each with a different combination of price, delay and logistics cost.
And the products themselves are not always independent. In HoReCa, ranges, sets and products purchased together can create dependencies: selling one reference may influence demand for another, while product lifecycle changes can affect the whole range. At the same time, part of future demand is already known through firm customer orders, while the rest still needs to be forecasted. The further the planning horizon, the more this balance changes.
The challenge is therefore not simply to forecast demand and replenish stock. It is to decide which part of demand should be covered immediately, which part can wait, which supplier should be used, how much should be ordered at once, and whether the resulting availability is worth the transport, warehouse and working-capital cost.
1. The deployment starts with supply-chain expertise, not just software configuration
Tomgast’s complexity cannot be captured by installing a standard replenishment model and applying the same parameters everywhere. At the beginning of the deployment, the Nadii team works with Tomgast to understand how its channels, customers, suppliers, logistics constraints and purchasing processes really work.
This initial supply-chain consulting is important because it determines what should actually be automated and where the largest business value sits. The objective is not to reproduce existing rules in a new tool, but to identify where those rules should be changed — and configure Nadii around the real economics of Tomgast’s business.
This also means that modules can be introduced according to value and maturity rather than forcing the company into one predefined operating model.
2. One supplier order can contain several completely different demand logics
For Tomgast, two units of the same SKU are not necessarily driven by the same business need.
For e-commerce or marketplace demand, availability is often immediate: if the product is not there, the sale may simply be lost. For larger project or tender-related demand, the customer can often communicate the need earlier and may accept a longer delivery time — but receiving the complete order can be much more important than receiving individual lines immediately.
Nadii keeps those differences inside the replenishment calculation. The final purchase order sent to a supplier can still contain one quantity per SKU, but that quantity is built from several components: firm customer orders, expected demand and dedicated protection for the different channels.
Each channel can therefore have its own dynamically calculated buffer, reflecting its demand uncertainty, service expectation and the financial consequence of being unavailable. These buffers are recalculated every day rather than being frozen in one generic safety-stock parameter.
This allows Tomgast to protect immediate-demand channels where availability matters most, without holding the same inventory protection for demand that is already known in advance or where customers can wait.
3. Ordering frequency is decided from the total logistics cost, not from purchase price alone
Ordering more frequently can reduce inventory and improve responsiveness — but increase transport and warehouse handling costs. Ordering more at once can make better use of a pallet or container and reduce the cost per unit — but it also increases stock, warehouse occupation and cash tied up in inventory.
For Tomgast, this trade-off varies significantly by supplier. A European delivery, an overseas container and a pallet shipment can have completely different economics. MOQ, unit packaging, supplier conditions and freight thresholds add another layer.
Nadii evaluates these costs together. It considers purchase conditions, MOQ and packaging rules, transport alternatives, warehouse and handling costs, expected demand, potential lost sales and the cost of frozen cash.
The system can therefore decide that for one supplier it is better to place larger, less frequent orders, while for another the better result comes from smaller and more frequent replenishment. The objective is not to minimise inventory, transport or purchasing cost separately. It is to minimise the overall expected cost while protecting the availability that generates value.
4. Automation remains transparent and controllable
This is particularly important at Tomgast because the final recommendation can combine many different reasons: part of the quantity may come from a firm customer order, another part from forecast demand, another from an e-commerce buffer, and another from the economics of filling a pallet or reaching a supplier MOQ.
Nadii keeps that logic visible. Users can understand why a quantity is being ordered, what demand and channel it protects, which supplier or logistics constraint influenced the decision and what trade-off the system made between availability, stock and cost.
When something is unusual or uncertain, Nadii can flag the decision for attention instead of silently automating it. Users can also override the recommendation when they have information outside the system, while keeping the intervention traceable and measuring afterwards whether it improved the result.
That is what makes automation acceptable in a complex purchasing environment: Tomgast does not need to manually verify every line, but it can always understand and control the lines that matter.
For Tomgast, the result is not simply better forecasting or lower stock. Nadii turns very different channels, customer commitments, supplier options and logistics constraints into one coherent ordering decision — protecting availability where it creates value, while avoiding the transport, warehouse and working-capital costs of protecting everything in the same way.
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Nadii managed to be powerful, complete and evolutive, while staying practical for everyday decision-making.
The motorcycle business is very specific and highly seasonal. Nadii understood those specifics — and, more importantly, what they mean financially. That made a real difference and helped us save a significant amount of money.
Availability was a challenge for us, but not at any cost. We needed a system that understood how our business really works, while remaining transparent and controllable. The goal was not simply better availability — it was better profitability.
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