McElroy Manufacturing Scaled Revenue, Not Stock with Intuiflow

Discover how McElroy Manufacturing leveraged Intuiflow by Algo’s demand-driven planning to double their revenue, conquer supply chain chaos, and drastically reduce production line stoppages.

McElroy Manufacturing — Tulsa, Oklahoma — has built plastic pipe fusion equipment for 55+ years. Products range from handheld tools to machines fusing pipe up to 2 meters in diameter. With four facilities and global distribution, McElroy runs a complex, interdependent supply chain managed as a single production environment.

The Challenge

Hundreds of SKUs with different demand profiles — 200 units/month down to 2/year — were managed through a system that had to be augmented with manual Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. Every signal looked identical regardless of urgency, creating constant noise:

• Expedite Monday, defer Wednesday — perpetual priority reshuffling
• Buyers couldn’t separate noise from genuine urgency
• Minimized production stoppages from purchased part shortages resulting from proactively addressed threats to the plan
• Inventory growing without visibility into correct positioning

Pourquoi Intuiflow ?

• McElroy discovered that Intuiflow could solve one of their biggest challenges. Their priority was one trusted source of truth, buffer-based logic planning to a level — not a date, and an intuitive interface that buyers could actually trust.
• The platform simulation sealed the deal for McElroy. Algo modeled McElroy’s actual demand history against DDMRP buffers — their own parts, their own data — making the abstract approach immediately tangible

The Implementation

McElroy went live Sept 2021 with purchased parts. Buyers were onboarded one at a time — resolving individual questions, building advocates, sharing lessons before the next. The team blended forward-looking demand signals with trailing usage to anticipate shifts early. Routine replenishments were automated; buyers focused on genuine exceptions.

The Results

• Revenue doubled with inventory growth controlled and correctly positioned
• Significant reduction to production line stoppages due to purchased part availability
• Buyers shifted from firefighting to exception-based daily workflow
• Single source of truth replaced Access databases & monthly Excel exercises

As Philip Maud put it: “The stockouts we were having before versus how little we’re stopping the line today — it’s night and day. We’ve doubled in size and been able to control that inventory growth, making sure it’s invested in the right places.”