Partnering to Support a Digital Transformation Journey
STARK Building Materials UK Ltd is a leading distributor of building and construction materials serving professional builders and tradespeople across the UK. As part of the wider STARK Group, one of Europe’s foremost heavy building materials distribution organizations, STARK UK operates across a large branch and distribution hub network and continues to invest in modern supply chain capabilities that support availability, efficiency, and scalable ways of working.
STARK UK has been transforming over the past three years, implementing a robust programme of change to benefit its customers, communities and colleagues. To strengthen its demand forecasting and replenishment capabilities as part of a broader digital transformation, STARK UK partnered with RELEX Solutions. The collaboration was designed to bring greater consistency, visibility, and confidence to supply chain decision-making across the network, while supporting a collaborative operating model across supply chain, commercial, and branch teams.
Building a Flexible and Consistent Planning Model
STARK UK selected RELEX to improve visibility, consistency, and decision-making at scale. The RELEX platform supports a flexible operating model, allowing planning capabilities to be applied at the product-group level to reflect differing operational requirements, while retaining a consistent, central view of demand, inventory, and performance across the network.
This balance between standardization and flexibility enables teams to operate effectively within a shared governance framework. By moving toward a centralized, category-aligned planning approach, supply chain and commercial teams benefit from common performance metrics, shared dashboards, and a unified view of stock positions and demand signals. This supports more proactive decision-making and greater alignment between planning and commercial objectives.
RELEX partner, Wysupp supported the implementation, including refinements to planning parameters for slow-moving inventory and minimum fill quantities. Working closely together, STARK UK and RELEX progressively onboarded branches across the network, ensuring teams have the tools, visibility, and confidence to operate effectively within the new model.
A key benefit of the collaboration has been improved transparency across supply chain operations. Shared dashboards and consistent performance metrics give planners, category managers, and regional supply managers direct access to live stock positions, demand signals, and order proposals, providing a single, reliable view across the network.
This visibility allows planning teams to move away from reactive branch-by-branch management and toward proactive, category-level oversight. Planners now focus on performance analysis and exception management while automated replenishment handles routine ordering. The result is a more efficient use of planning capacity and stronger alignment between branch operations and category strategy.
Improved Visibility Supporting Better Decision-Making
With RELEX, STARK UK has achieved meaningful improvements across key supply chain metrics. Branches operating within the RELEX platform consistently maintain high product availability, which is what customers are looking for from their preferred builders’ merchants. Availability is now actively measured and managed against a consistent network-wide standard, rather than left to local branch judgement. In Heavy Building Materials, where yard management complexity and demand variability create additional planning challenges, there have also been strong gains.
Across the network, RELEX-enabled planning has delivered a marked reduction in stockouts and a significant increase in perfectly stocked product lines. STARK UK also achieved a substantial increase in planning productivity. The team now has greater confidence in replenishment decisions, clearer visibility across branch performance, and less manual intervention in ordering.
“In the building materials trade, having sufficient depth of stock for a customer to complete an entire project rather than picking up a single item is the meaningful measure of service quality,” said Mark Cryan, Product Owner, STARK UK. “With RELEX, we are now data-driven and have the tools to make high availability the norm. We can provide category managers with proactive guidance and network-wide visibility, allowing for more consistent decision-making across the business.”
RELEX continues to play an important role in STARK UK’s supply chain operations, supporting ongoing optimization and improvement as the business evolves. The partnership is built on a collaborative model that spans supply chain planning, commercial teams, and branches with shared data and consistent measurement, enabling better decisions at every level. By combining the flexibility of the RELEX platform with strong cross-functional ways of working, STARK UK is well positioned to continue further improving availability, efficiency, and scalability across its network, delivering a consistent and quality service for the professional builders and tradespeople it serves across the UK.