Tiger Brands Beverages Turns to ToolsGroup for Demand-Driven Inventory Optimization

ToolsGroup also announced the opening of a new office today in Cape Town, South Africa, which will be headed by Managing Director Heinrich Dill. The opening of the Cape Town office comes about in response to the strong demand in South Africa for inventory optimization and supply chain planning solutions. Tiger is ToolsGroup's third customer in South Africa, joining another large consumer goods company and Super Group, a leading third-party logistics (3PL) provider.

Tiger Brands is a 20 Billion Rand (US $2.5 Billion), branded, fast-moving consumer goods company that operates in South Africa and selected emerging markets. Its Beverages division supports five major brands spanning a number of popular beverage products.

Tiger Brands launched the effort with ToolsGroup to ensure it maintains the high customer service levels standard it has set for itself, while driving down inventory. Although great strides toward this goal had been achieved by the company's master planner, the company recognized that a more advanced system could lift service levels even further, with the added benefit of reducing inventory to optimally efficient levels.

"This is doubly exciting for us," said Joseph Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup. "First, we are, of course, very pleased to add Tiger Brands Beverages to our list of consumer goods customers, which also includes Colgate-Palmolive, Diageo, BAT and many others. In addition, we are excited to see the Cape Town office off to a solid start with this and several other new customers and projects."

Shamir is in South Africa this week for the official opening of the Cape Town office and is scheduled to speak at the annual conference for the Association for Operations Management for South Africa (SAPICS) 2009 on Monday, July 13. In his presentation at SAPICS, which is titled "Mastering Lumpy Demand," Shamir will discuss how to optimize management of low-volume, intermittent demand SKUs where traditional inventory techniques do not work.

About ToolsGroup

ToolsGroup is an innovation partner for companies who want to achieve outstanding customer-service levels and less global inventory. Using our demand-driven inventory optimization and supply chain planning solutions, our customers improve daily forecast accuracy and correctly set safety stocks to significantly cut inventory and achieve customer-service levels up to 99+ percent. ToolsGroup has more than 150 customers in 31 countries worldwide. For more information on ToolsGroup and its solutions, please visit www.ToolsGroup.com.