Managing your inventory — balancing dollars and euros tied up in inventory and customer service levels — isn’t about finding a sweet spot. It’s about realising that successful inventory management requires the orchestration of demand and supply data across the entire company supply chain. Here are four simple steps aimed at increasing your decision-making agility, which can be highly rewarding and improve your overall inventory management.
1. Aim to have end-to-end supply chain visibility
When you need to respond quickly to changing market requirements and urgent customer requests, you can’t rely on phone, email or excel to get timely updates and an understand of where you stand—market conditions change much too quickly for that. You need to be able to access your inventory demand requirements that are built around your lead times. That makes a cloud-based inventory forecasting solution like Intuendi an essential component of any agile inventory management.
2. When possible real-time analysis to profitably fulfil demand
Once you have up-to-the-minute information on inventory levels and fulfilment requirements, you need to be able to analyse your supply chain to ensure effective demand fulfilment continuously. Will insufficient stock levels result in service-level fines or lost sales? Will overstocks lead to increases in obsolete inventory? Bottom line: What is the most effective response to a given stock situation? Giving planners real-time visibility supported by sophisticated analytics that draws simultaneously from all of your available data allows them to find the right answer to your inventory requirements quickly.
3. Challenge your assumptions with data science and lead technology
Is your current planning system producing erratic safety stock recommendations and unnecessary purchase orders? Are you using static lead times? Even the most sophisticated planning models can become less useful if their underlying assumptions are outdated or inaccurate. We can help you with that part to ensure you are making the most from your inventory forecasting solution.
By understanding actual lead-time and ordering trends for your industry, you may be able to meet customer service levels more consistently, while avoiding unnecessary carrying costs. Our data science and Intuendi can help you gain insights by leveraging the cloud-based technology that provides you with end-to-end supply chain visibility. Our models will draw from continually updated trends for product demand, lead times, replenishment quantities, and other assumptions.
