One live view of every Total Tools store.

The challenge.

Running a national tools and hardware retailer means tracking sales, margin and inventory across dozens of stores that each trade a little differently — a mining town, a metro trade counter and a suburban outlet rarely sell the same lines at the same pace. Total Tools' leaders were piecing that picture together from point-of-sale exports, spreadsheets and store-level reports that arrived days apart, in formats that never quite agreed. By the time a consolidated view existed, it described last week, not today.

The cost showed up on the shelves. Without a reliable, forward-looking read on demand, popular lines ran out in one region while sitting as dead stock in another — stockouts losing sales, overstock tying up working capital, and buyers reacting to yesterday rather than planning for next month.

What RUBIX did.

RUBIX built the data foundation first, then the view and the forecasting on top of it. Working alongside Total Tools' retail, merchandising and finance teams, we:

• Built a connected data platform that brings point-of-sale, inventory and finance data from every store into one governed model, with agreed definitions for sales, margin and stock on hand.
• Delivered an executive dashboard that shows sales, margin and inventory across the entire network in one live view — drillable from group down to a single store or product category.
• Added demand forecasting tuned to each store's local trading pattern and seasonality, so buyers plan replenishment against expected demand rather than last week's sales.
• Set up near real-time refresh and exception alerts, so a looming stockout or a margin dip surfaces the same day instead of at the end of a reporting cycle.

Throughout, delivery stayed fixed-scope and vendor-independent — no bloated team, no open-ended engagement, and a platform the retailer's own teams can run and extend.

The results.

Leaders now open one live view instead of waiting on a stack of manual reports. The executive dashboard gives the whole network at a glance, and demand forecasting means buyers order to expected demand — so the right stock lands in the right store, and less capital sits idle on the wrong shelves.

• Sales, margin and inventory across 90+ stores in a single live view, drillable to store and category.
• Demand forecast accuracy improved by 15%+, cutting both stockouts and overstock.
• Consolidated reporting that once took days now takes minutes, refreshed near real-time.
• Leaders make replenishment and range decisions from one trusted set of numbers.

Representative example — figures illustrate the type of outcome RUBIX delivers for organisations of this kind and are not a precise account of a specific engagement.

Why it matters.

In Australian retail, margin is won and lost on the shelf — and you cannot manage a store network you can only see days late. RUBIX's executive dashboard puts sales, margin and inventory in one live view on a connected data platform, then adds forecasting so buying decisions look forward, not back. That combination turns reporting from a manual scramble into a live decision-making tool, and turns demand data into fewer stockouts, less overstock and better working capital.