T-H Marine Cut Stockouts to a Quarter of Their Starting Point with Intuiflow
Discover how T-H Marine leveraged Intuiflow by Algo’s demand-driven planning to cut inventory value by $1M, slash stockouts by 75%, and tame 10,000 SKUs of volatile demand.
T-H Marine — a 50-year-old marine parts and accessories manufacturer — supplies 646 OEM customers, including Malibu, MasterCraft, and Tracker, plus 1,205 aftermarket customers across distributors, dealers, retailers, and e-commerce. Demand is shaped by boat production cycles, seasonality, and a customer base where two-thirds of orders land with less than two weeks’ notice.
The Challenge
A lean planning team managed close to 10,000 SKUs on legacy MRP — a system built for stable demand, not the volatility T-H Marine actually deals with.
- A small team carrying outsized planning responsibility on top of other purchasing duties
- Forecasts that were rarely right, with order volume swinging unpredictably even from long-standing OEMs
- No reliable way to calculate safety stock, so inventory became the default insurance against uncertainty
- No single source of truth — purchase orders, work orders, and forecasts scattered across legacy systems and spreadsheets
Why Intuiflow?
- T-H Marine needed one system, one source of truth — running planning natively inside NetSuite eliminated a separate platform, reconciliation, and administrative overhead
- DDMRP’sbuffer-based logic matched how their business actually behaves, absorbing demand variability instead of reacting to every forecast swing
- The platform targeted their specific pain points: reducing manual SKU-by-SKU planning, managing long China-sourcing lead times, and protecting service levels through OEM demand swings
The Implementation
T-H Marine went live on NetSuite and Intuiflow in August 2022. Before results could show, the team had to clean up years of stale data — lead times, MOQs, sourcing rules, BOMs, item master data — a process that took nearly a year. Adoption was the other hurdle: planners comfortable with MRP were skeptical of buffers, and DDMRP training paired with early wins gradually built trust across the team. Static reorder points gave way to dynamic buffers, manual safety stock calculations became automated, and planners shifted from reviewing every SKU to focusing on exceptions.
The Results
- Distribution center inventory value dropped from $5.96M to $4.84M while stockouts fell to a quarter of where they started
- Distribution center service levels held between 95.1% and 97.5% on purchased finished goods, weathering a 200+ SKU demand spike from a single distributor order
- Overbuying “just in case” stopped being the default, freeing up working capital tied up in excess stock
- Production facility service levels held between 97.4% and 98.9% on make items and raw materials, even through multiple acquisitions and new product lines
“When I was first introduced to DDMRP, a light went on in my head of course. I’m glad there’s a tool for it.
Intuiflow is spot on. It says, ‘Here’s when you need a purchase order.'” What used to be planner-driven guesswork is now a system-guided recommendation — and a team that trusts the data behind it. Intuiflow became the vehicle by which we got things right.”Bryan Layton, VP Technology at T-H Marine