Elkay

The Client: Elkay is an American-owned and operated innovative manufacturer of stainless steel kitchen sinks, faucets, foodservice products, cabinets, drinking fountains with 3500+ employees

The Challenge: Elkay had difficulties finding the optimal vendor for it supplies. SSI team worked with the Elkay management team during several rounds of supplier negotiations and modeled vendor responses and ran numerous optimization scenarios to select the best suppliers and helped Elkay transition from the incumbent vendors to the optimal vendors over a two year time period.

The Solution: The key processes involved by SSI for modeling the optimal vendor search system were demand analysis, supplier modeling and supplier selection. Demand Analysis was done by determining raw material widths to source. Supplier modeling included modeling of supplier responses including price structures, discount structures, incentives, etc. Supplier selection was done by determining optimal mix of suppliers for each product and facility through mathematical optimization modeling.

The Results: Through SSI’s help Elkay was able to reduce 11% sourcing cost for the first year and eventually succeeded in reducing %5 additional sourcing cost for the second year. Moreover, annual material costs were lowered from $50 million to $42 million.