How can I effectively manage a large range of products easily and still improve turnover and service levels?

The Challenges of a Large Product Range

Managing tens of thousands of products across a network, even just a thousand or more in a branch can raise many challenges, including: 

• As much as some branch, warehouse and product managers might like to think they can, it is beyond human comprehension to effectively manage that many products
• You have to find ways to manage often very low revenue items at low cost. The overheads of product management will defeat you if you do not have the right tools in place.
• If you have many branches and warehouses, the subtleties of regional variations can escape you because there is simply not the ‘bandwidth’ to deal with the complexity.

You break the problem up into manageable parts but the scale and the complexity conspire to raise your overheads.

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Strategies and Tools to Help you Manage

micq-if can help you manage a large range of products through strategies, disciplines and tools that include:

• Identifying matched items from retail sales history
• Automatically identifying quantities in which items commonly sold, even for items with as few as ten sales.
• Helping you manage branch product range and depth even under changing business conditions
• Conducting ‘daily reviews’ of purchase order recommendations … yes you can do this effectively and efficiently, and achieve substantial benefits.
• Automatically identifying excess stock and moving it before it becomes too much of a problem, and do so via ‘business case’ reviews of every product across all your warehouses, every night.

You can reduce your investment in high turnover items where demand and supply is stable, and fill in the gaps in your range in ways that can help you improve service and reduce inventory. Where inventory optimisation determines that you cannot justify holding stock due to Return On Assets considerations or risk, the system can do the hard work for you. You don’t need to invest a lot of people time in overriding the system. You can set your high level policies for normal and emergency order costs, how customer lead times are to be interpreted, the capabilities of your supply chain and replenishment cycles, service levels, profit targets, ROA objectives … and then tune the system settings and results to suit your overall strategy and the business climate.