Challenges: Manual Forecasting, Static Thresholds & Limited Store-Level Visibility
Opus Art Supplies runs seven stores and an e-commerce site across roughly 20,000 SKUs, sourced from local suppliers with three-day turnarounds to overseas partners on three-month lead times, all flowing through one central warehouse that also operates as a retail location and the fulfillment hub for online orders. As the business grew, the purchasing team built strong expertise forecasting from sales history in Excel, and saw a clear opportunity to bring that same expertise into a system that could move faster — connecting purchasing decisions directly to what each store needed, and giving them a repeatable way to plan ahead for seasonal shifts and new store rollouts.
Solutions: ConverSight Agentic Decision Intelligence for AI Demand Forecasting and Purchase Order Optimization
AI Demand Forecasting
Athena generates SKU-level forecasts from 24 months of sales history, refreshed monthly and reviewed before it drives any purchase order.
Recommended Purchase Orders by Vendor
On-hand inventory, open POs, vendor lead times, and forecasted demand combine into a single ranked recommendation of what to order, how much, and by when.
Proactive Monitoring and Alerting
A dedicated data-load monitoring layer and daily alerting were added so the team knows immediately if a recommendation is out of date, not after the fact.
Estimated Loss & Stockout Alerts
Critical shortages are flagged before they cost a sale, ranked by dollar impact and lead time.
Athena, ConverSight’s AI Employee
Users can ask inventory and sales questions in natural language and receive immediate answers, eliminating the need for manual reports or spreadsheet analysis.
Before and After ConverSight
| Manual, spreadsheet-driven purchase orders on static min/max thresholds | AI demand forecasting with daily recommendation refresh |
| Stockout risk tracked informally across SKUs | Shortages quantified by dollar impact and lead time |
| Fragmented reporting across disconnected supply chain systems | Unified supply chain visibility across purchasing, inventory, and sales |
| Purchasing decisions confined to the warehouse level | Foundation built for store-level demand fulfillment |
The recommended purchase order storyboard is what we build our purchases around now. It’s not a report we glance at, it’s how we make the call, every single day. It’s given our team a level of confidence in purchasing that we simply didn’t have before, and that’s changed how we plan for the business going forward.
Susannah Blundell, Director of Purchasing and Logistics at Opus Art Supplies
Industry:
Retail
Art and Craft
Company Type:
Private
ERP:
Acumatica
