Inventory Planning Blog

As your business grows and gains in complexity, you may need to explore how advanced inventory planning and optimization capabilities can take your business to the next level. Valogix, a global award-winning partner of NetSuite. We offer a specialized multi-stage planning engine that more effectively plans inventories and compliments NetSuite.

It is a new year and still old issues abound as well as new ones. In these challenging times, balancing near term inventory resilience with longer-term objectives is an on-going process. You read a lot about reducing costs, buying less, increasing productivity, improving cash flow and more. It is important to keep inventory objectives balanced and in perspective. Yes, times are starting to be more stable in certain areas, but you need to improve your competitive advantage.

Customers will always demand more of suppliers to provide affordable products at the exact moment they want them. How can you effectively insure you have what your customers need when they need it? Supply Chain Management (SCM) is front and center of every business across the globe.

Advanced Inventory Solutions Complement ERP Systems 

Spare parts inventory management is a prime candidate for advanced inventory planning and optimization solutions. With many diverse parts to manage and a lack of power tools, most companies with parts inventories have too many of the wrong parts. The result is unnecessary inventory expense, while still suffering service-limiting stock-outs.

The challenge facing people and companies is they must work steadily at improving their inventory management. In order to improve, you need to know where you are today. First, is to determine what they have accomplished and how competent they are in their planning. Their level of experience and results must be measured to accurately and efficiently move forward.

Part 1 of our Inventory Forecasting blog, covers an overview to inventory forecasting and the techniques available. This continues to review the approaches to inventory forecasting.

Forecasting customer demand is an important and necessary part of the chain of calculations needed to optimize inventory stocking levels. There are a wide variety of techniques that can be used, making forecasting a confusing and sometimes difficult process. If your goal is to not only forecast demand but also stock inventory at optimal levels, then forecasting must be combined with inventory planning and replenishment optimization algorithms to reach the goals of higher service levels with less inventory.

There are some distinctions of business purchases, strategic and non-strategic. Strategic purchases are those that have a direct effect on the business and the bottom line. Non-strategic are those for everyday items like office supplies, travel, commodity items, etc. In the case of manufacturing companies, strategic purchases can be raw materials, production equipment, energy, skilled labor, computers, and business operating software.