Kitaeinkauf now plans purchasing and inventory with numi. The shop is operated by Lieblingsshop GmbH and supplies daycare centres with furniture, equipment and consumables — an assortment broad enough that the sheer number of decisions becomes the planning problem.
Breadth of assortment, depth of decisions
A broad online assortment creates a planning problem of scale rather than complexity in any single decision. Individually, no reorder is difficult. Collectively, thousands of articles across many suppliers generate more decisions each week than any team can consider properly on its own merits.
What usually happens is triage: the fast movers get attention, the long tail gets a static reorder rule, and capital quietly accumulates in the middle — the kind inventory optimization surfaces. Meanwhile the items that actually deserve a second look — a slow mover that has started to accelerate, a supplier whose lead time has drifted — are exactly the ones nobody has time to notice.
On top of that sits a demand pattern that follows the daycare year. Furniture and equipment purchases cluster around budget cycles and refurbishment projects, while consumables are ordered continuously. Two patterns that the same plan has to serve.
Solving that means forecasting every article rather than the top few hundred, and then ranking the resulting decisions so attention goes where it earns the most.
With numi, Kitaeinkauf combines these capabilities in one supply chain intelligence platform.
The go-live includes:
- AI demand forecasting at SKU level to make demand planning more precise across the full assortment, including the long tail.
- Automated replenishment proposals and order creation to reduce manual effort and speed up purchasing workflows.
- Supplier performance monitoring with a full KPI system to create a shared, fact-based view of supplier reliability and lead times.
- Dynamic alerts for real-time market responsiveness so teams can react faster to changing conditions.
What changes in day-to-day purchasing
The result is less manual work, fewer stockouts and smarter purchasing decisions. By turning operational data into timely recommendations, the team can focus more of its expertise on the decisions that matter most to customers and the business.
We would like to thank the entire team at Lieblingsshop GmbH for their trust and partnership. We are proud to support this next step in their supply chain transformation and look forward to the journey ahead.
