About Qonnect Fasteners
Qonnect® has built its reputation on having the best available techniques for blind fastening. Its philosophy is simple but exacting: fasteners exist to do one job, connect, and that connection has to be dependable, every time. Qonnect sees C-parts not as a minor detail, but as one of the most critical sections of any production chain or application, shaped by years of experience developing and co-engineering fasteners alongside its customers.
Qonnect and its sister company Feifar for Austria are part of an international holding. As trading companies, they source technical fastening components from around the world and supply them to their customers, backed by the technical expertise needed to translate that know-how into the right product for each customer’s application. Qonnect has grown quickly in recent years and for Operations Director Paul Steijns, that growth is exactly why the business needed to change how it plans.
The challenge
When Paul joined Qonnect, the planning team was really a purchasing team: buyers working from the previous year’s sales figures, tracked in spreadsheets, with no dedicated demand planning process behind it. It was a method that had carried the business a long way, but it had a ceiling: a market quietly growing, or slowing down, wouldn’t show up in last year’s numbers, and Qonnect’s ERP system added its own constraints, relying on fixed minimum and maximum stock levels that couldn’t flex for something like a newly won project.
The result was a familiar pattern for fast-growing trading businesses: sometimes too little bought, sometimes the wrong things bought, and it kept happening. “That’s the moment I knew: this has to change,” Paul recalls. Not because the team lacked capability, but because the business had outgrown the process it was running on, and it was time to professionalize how Qonnect planned demand, not just how it bought.
The project
Paul already knew EyeOn from earlier in his career and its reputation helping large multinationals sharpen their supply chain planning. What he hadn’t had was the right moment to work together until Honeycomb Forecast came along: a ready-to-run, self-service forecasting module built for growing businesses ready to take their next step in planning maturity, without the price tag or complexity of a full enterprise system.
For Paul, the appeal went beyond the software. “There are plenty of planning systems to choose from,” he says. “But Honeycomb isn’t built by a software company, it’s built by expert consultants that actually do this work, day in day out. That knowledge is baked into the tool itself, and there’s still a real team of experts behind it.” That mattered, because Paul wasn’t looking for a purely technical fix. He wanted his team to build genuine forecasting capability and the confidence to trust it.
That shaped the rollout. Paul brought his team in from the very first conversations, wanting Honeycomb to become something they owned. What struck him first was the pace: a working setup within the first few sessions. “That speed took away a lot of the uncertainty you’d normally expect at the start of something like this,” he says. The team also noticed how deliberately the tool was built: despite real depth under the surface, Honeycomb only shows a team what it needs at its current stage of maturity. Along the way, the team made a shift that stuck with Paul. Rather than correcting an odd number after the fact, they learned to look upstream, at the inputs driving the forecast. “That was a real eye-opener,” he says. “It changed how they think about the numbers, not just how they use the tool.”
Under the hood, Honeycomb Forecast starts with an advanced statistical forecasting engine that produces a high-quality baseline forecast, so planners no longer need to build one manually for every product. From there, a planner-friendly interface lets the team layer their own knowledge on top, while built-in insights track the KPIs that matter most in demand planning, forecast accuracy, bias, and forecast value added, so Paul’s team can see exactly where to focus and keep improving over time. The whole setup connects directly into Qonnect’s ERP system, Microsoft Navision, keeping forecasts and transactional data in sync.
Results
Honeycomb Forecast is now configured around Qonnect’s own data, and Paul’s team is moving its full demand planning cycle onto the platform this month. It’s early days, but the shift is already visible:
- A structured demand planning process for the first time. A real step up from spreadsheets and last year’s sales figures.
- Sharper, more forward-looking questions about demand, instead of relying purely on last year’s figures.
- Growing trust in the numbers, built on understanding why the forecast behaves the way it does, not just accepting what it says.
Paul expects that foundation to pay off well beyond this first phase. With long Asian lead times, supply chain challenges from geopolitical tensions and current planning constraints, Qonnect’s average stock position is pushed to unattractively high levels. Sharper demand planning will help the business hold less unnecessary inventory while improving the service level customers count on and free the team to focus on higher-impact work.
“Honeycomb Forecast gave my team a structured way of thinking about demand that we simply didn’t have before,” Paul says. “As we roll it out across our full planning cycle, I’m confident it’ll help us buy more accurately, trust our numbers, and look after our customers even better than we do today.”
About Honeycomb Forecast
Paul’s story is exactly the moment Honeycomb Forecast is built for: a growing business that has outgrown spreadsheets but doesn’t need, or want, the cost and complexity of a full enterprise planning system. By pairing ready-to-run, best-practice forecasting with a team that has spent years solving these problems for businesses of every size, Qonnect was able to move quickly from manual, history-based buying toward a demand planning process it can trust and keep building on.
If your organization is ready to move beyond manual, fragmented planning but isn’t looking for a heavy transformation program, our Honeycomb Platform can help you get better forecasts and inventory decisions, right out of the box. Book a demo or get in touch with our team to see what it could do for you.