A New Look at Safety Stock

Theoretically, it should be easy to determine when to reorder a stocked item from a supplier. If you know that customers will order ten pieces of the product each day, and you know that it will take seven days to get the shipment from the vendor, you should reorder...

Are You Making Money?

I’m going to begin this article with two assumptions which should be true for all manufacturers (who maintain stock inventory), distributors, and retailers: You stock material to meet your customers’ expectations of product availability. You are in...

A New Look at Measuring Customer Service

A common measurement of the performance of your stocked inventory is the customer service level. It measures how often you have the items you’ve committed to stock when your customers want them. The customer service level is calculated with this formula: # of...