For years, ClearBags managed thousands of packaging SKUs the same way many growing manufacturers do—through a patchwork of spreadsheets, experience, and a legacy system that only a few people truly understood.
As the company expanded into new markets and doubled down on e-commerce, those tools started to show their age. Forecasting was manual, purchasing was reactive, and there were no real alerts—just long nights trying to make sense of colors and formulas in Excel.
When growth surged again in 2018, the team knew it was time for change. They moved first to NetSuite, replacing their FoxPro ERP. But the real transformation began in 2020, when ClearBags implemented Intuiflow, turning its planning and replenishment into a demand-driven process that could scale with its business.
ClearBags began as a family business in 1992, when founder Benny Wilkins started selling flat posters protected by clear, crystal-wrap sleeves. What began as a small side project became a national packaging brand serving stationery, art, and food companies across the U.S.
Today, ClearBags operates from two distribution centers—Tennessee and Nevada—serving thousands of customers and managing over 5,500 products. The company imports roughly 200 full containers a year, with around 10,000 active Intuiflow records feeding daily planning decisions.
But before Intuiflow, the company’s systems couldn’t keep pace with its growth. “Our old setup worked great—until it didn’t,” the inventory and logistics manager recalls. “Everything was manual. If something was off, no one knew until it was too late.”
Before 2018, ClearBags ran on a FoxPro database that the team affectionately called “the Winchester Mystery House”—a maze of tables, shortcuts, and custom scripts built over decades.
Purchasing relied on a massive Excel forecasting sheet created by the company’s president—an impressive DIY blend of momentum ratios and reorder logic that only two people could fully decode. “It worked,” the manager laughs, “but it was chaos. You could do whatever you wanted, but nobody else could follow it.”
The system lacked alerts or integration with sales data. Forecasting cycles were tedious. And as the company’s online business expanded, the risk of stockouts or overstocking grew with it.
In 2018, ClearBags replaced FoxPro with NetSuite, but even then, the team still planned manually for two more years. What they needed was a smarter, connected way to translate demand signals into daily replenishment.
In late 2019, ClearBags began testing Intuiflow (then called Replenishment+) in a NetSuite sandbox. The goal was to link real consumption and lead times directly into replenishment orders. By January 2020, Intuiflow went live.
Almost immediately, planners saw the difference. Instead of reacting to late orders, they started each day with a dashboard that showed priorities, transfers, and alerts across both distribution centers.
“Intuiflow made our work teachable,” the manager explains. “Before, if one of us left, the logic went with us. Now, any planner can open the dashboard and see exactly what needs attention first.”
ClearBags customized the system to match its business:
Each morning, planners review Intuiflow’s critical alerts—the red and orange items that signal urgent buys or transfers. Many of these aren’t shortages at all, but inventory that needs to move from Tennessee to Nevada or vice versa to balance availability.
Weekly, the team batches purchase orders by vendor and location using Intuiflow’s Accept Recommended Orders feature. About 300 new SKUs are added to the system each year, imported in bulk through CSVs to create Intuiflow records automatically.
Custom searches and dashboards help planners see days of coverage across both locations at once, ensuring that even if one warehouse dips low, the online store remains stocked.
“It’s not just just-in-time,” the manager says. “It’s just right. That’s what we’re aiming for.”
No sooner had Intuiflow gone live than the pandemic hit. Demand plunged in early 2020, then surged higher than ever later that year. Lead times from overseas suppliers doubled, then suddenly collapsed again.
The company adjusted on the fly, expanding its ADU horizon to 180 days to better absorb seasonality and long lead times. When supply stabilized, planners shortened the horizon again.
At the same time, they introduced maximum order quantities to smooth purchasing and prevent overwhelming vendors during spikes—a key lesson in avoiding the bullwhip effect.
Lead times are now tracked historically and forecasted forward, blending what vendors promise with what they’ve actually delivered. The result: steadier flow and fewer surprises.
Three years into their journey, ClearBags operates with a level of visibility and confidence that spreadsheets could never deliver. Service levels are higher. Transfers between DCs are faster. And onboarding new planners takes days instead of months.
“Our old world was firefighting,” the manager reflects. “Now we work by exception. We trust the system to tell us what really matters.”
Cycle counts on top SKUs protect the 20 percent of products that drive two-thirds of sales. Planned adjustment factors let planners handle seasonal or custom orders without breaking flow. And as supply conditions shift, the Smart Buffer Profiler and Lead Time Analyzer keep parameters in sync automatically.
ClearBags’ demand-driven transformation hasn’t just optimized inventory—it’s changed how the business thinks. With real-time data and clear priorities, the team can focus on growth instead of guesswork.
“We’ll never stop refining,” the manager says. “Business changes every year. But Intuiflow gives us the tools to stay balanced—to be fast, reliable, and just right.”
ClearBags’ results are what Intuiflow was built for—turning volatile, forecast-driven operations into agile, demand-driven flow.
Intuiflow is a single, connected Demand Driven platform that brings planning, scheduling, and execution into perfect alignment with real demand. Instead of chasing shortages or rescheduling manually, planners see live priorities, AI-optimized buffers, and one version of the truth across teams.
Materials Planning: Keep inventory aligned to true demand—prevent shortages and overstocks with AI-optimized buffers and automated replenishment.
Scheduling & Execution: Turn production priorities into predictable performance by sequencing work to actual capacity and demand.
Sales & Operations Planning: Link strategy to execution with real-time visibility across sales, finance, and operations.
Demand Planning: Replace static forecasts with adaptive, data-driven plans that flex as the market shifts.
Autopilot, Intuiflow’s built-in AI engine, continuously fine-tunes parameters across every module—removing manual effort while keeping plans responsive to real conditions. Embedded Power BI dashboards deliver insights instantly, and secure ERP integrations ensure a smooth, fast deployment.
ClearBags’ success shows how quickly Intuiflow scales—from pilot to enterprise-wide stability—driving agility, service-level gains, and working-capital efficiency in a matter of weeks, not quarters.
See how Intuiflow can help your team cut shortages, simplify planning, and keep product moving—just like ClearBags.