Building a bespoke stock model to balance both resource and costs.
With just under £1.5m tied up in inventory and a Procurement team inundated with daily requests from multiple sites, our client wanted to know whether they could reduce their stock holding at no expense to customer delivery.
The output would need to be updated to maintain stock levels on a regular basis and therefore required delivery of a tool that could be used on an ongoing basis.
People and systems.
Finding and engaging with all stakeholders was key to understanding the full inventory journey, physically and systematically, highlighting elements critical to business continuity.
Sourcing the data to quantify the process was made easy by their use of an ERP system which allowed us to consolidate alternative materials and build a complete view of the historical parts usage. This new dataset permitted us to forecast future requirements for each part, by location.
In addition, we categorised each part by its consumption value and criticality to business continuation, using Procurement data and data linked to the request, again stored within the ERP software.
Using Excel for its accessibility and creation of minimal difficulty with IT departments, we built a bespoke, dynamic model that would allow decision-makers to balance value of inventory held with the risk to stock availability and effect on re-ordering frequencies, in creating reorder levels specifically optimised to the business.
Understanding the data behind your supply chain can help to ease the pressure on your procurement teams – saving both time and money.
Over the following 12 months, total inventory value has decreased by 40% whilst also seeing a significant improvement in the availability of stock, resulting in an overall better asset readiness for their customer.
Furthermore, the demand on procurement reduced significantly, which enabled better supplier management and collaboration on the critical parts, leading to further time and money savings.
Related Services
Demand forecasting is a critical business requirement to support a range of business functions.
This service will be valuable to you if:
You want to free up cash held in excess stock.
You want to improve product availability.
Your business has a seasonal demand.
Your procurement team wants to stop ‘fire fighting’.
Business intelligence aims to interpret large datasets and present actionable information.
This service will be valuable to you if:
You have lots of data but no actionable insights.
Your spending too much time creating reports.
You’d like a better overall view of your business.
You want to drive decisions using evidence and data.