About Wiklunds Verktyg
Wiklunds Verktyg has supplied Swedish manufacturing with tools since 1990. From the warehouse in Jordbro, deliveries go straight to end customers across the country — in steel, automotive and general engineering, but also aerospace, medical technology, biotech and telecom.
The range is wide: cutting and holding tools across more than a hundred thousand items, plus special tools such as step drills, cutters and reamers made to the customer’s own drawings. Behind the range sit names like Sumitomo, InovaTools, Rego-Fix, Yamawa, Magafor and Mitutoyo — suppliers in Japan, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain and the USA.
The company is small in headcount and large in commitment. Around ten people, several of them technical sales engineers out with customers. The goal stated on their website is a simple one: that customers should always have the right tool for the job at hand.
The challenge
A tool distributor manufactures nothing. What is sold is not the insert — the same insert is available from several places. What is sold is that the tool is there when the machine is standing idle waiting for it.
And the chain is long. A customer order for a made-to-order tool becomes a purchase order to a manufacturer in Japan or Germany. There it sits, with a confirmed date that sometimes holds and sometimes slips. If it runs late, the customer order runs late — but only if nobody catches it in time.
The problem is rarely carelessness. The problem is that the link between purchase order and sales order is not visible by itself. Knowing a delivery is delayed is one thing. Knowing which customer it hits, and how badly, is another — and that question requires someone to sit down and compare two lists by hand.
With a hundred thousand items, suppliers in six countries and ten people in the company, that monitoring cannot depend on someone finding the time.
What Laila does
- Purchasing — turns demand into purchase orders with the right supplier, item, quantity and requested date.
- Supplier order follow-up — tracks every placed order until it is confirmed and delivered, instead of letting an unanswered order quietly sit there.
- Delay detection — continuously reconciles confirmed and estimated delivery dates against what was promised, and catches the slippage as it happens.
- Material tracking — keeps track of what is inbound, what is missing and what is already committed.
- Supplier dialogue — contacts the supplier for an answer, chases unconfirmed orders and follows up on the replies.
- Matching against sales orders — links every delayed purchase order to the customer orders that depend on it, so the consequence is visible immediately.
- Alerting — raises the alarm when a customer delivery is at risk, while there is still time to act on it.
From hindsight to early warning
Laila works directly in Garp, the same ERP as the rest of the company. No new interfaces to learn, no parallel list on the side — the monitoring happens where the purchase order and the sales order already sit.
The difference Laila makes is not that purchasing becomes less work. It is that the delay is discovered at the wrong moment one time fewer.
Without monitoring, a delay usually surfaces on the day the goods should have arrived — or later, when the customer calls. By then all that is left is an apology. With monitoring, the same delay surfaces when the supplier confirms a date that is wrong, and there is still room to act: call the supplier, split the delivery, pull an item from stock, offer an alternative, or simply tell the customer in good time.
Notice given two weeks ahead is service. The same notice on the delivery date is a complaint.
The effect
- Early warning instead of hindsight — customer deliveries at risk are flagged while alternatives still exist.
- No silent orders — unconfirmed purchase orders are chased automatically instead of forgotten.
- The consequence is visible — every supplier delay is tied to the customer order behind it.
- Sales can stay with customers — the monitoring happens regardless of who is in the office.
- The delivery promise holds — what separates one distributor from the next depends less on luck.
Next steps
Purchasing and delivery monitoring was the first process. The same approach can be applied to supplier quotation requests, deviations at goods receipt and supplier invoice matching — process by process, at the pace the business wants.