Justly Judging Your Vendors

What do you expect from a vendor? Most distributors, manufacturers, and retailers expect to receive the products they order: At the lowest possible price. On time. In salable or usable condition. Packaged to minimize the cost of preparing the item for sale or use. How...

Another Look at Inventory Turnover

First, let’s define “inventory turnover.” Turnover is the number of times you sell your average investment in inventory each year. Turnover is calculated with the following formula: Cost of Goods Sold from Stock Sales during the Past 12 Months...

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...

Accurately Measuring Customer Service

Your customers often don’t know what material they’re going to need before they actually need it. As a distributor you stock material to fulfill these immediate requirements. How well your inventory provides what your customers want will, to a great degree, determines...