LeanStock is a decision support tool specifically developed for organisations with a requirement to satisfy customer demand from stock. It analyses demand, sales or usage history to generate an individual forecast for each item at each location, based on the demand classification automatically assigned by the system and the rate of customer service the organisation sets as the target.
The demand classification system higlights an item as:
| Normal | Continuous history with relatively high volumes, can be forecast with confidence |
| Erratic | Intermittent history with medium to high volumes, can be forecast with reasonable confidence |
| Lumpy | Very intermittent history with medium to high volumes, can be forecast but with limited confidence. Preferably not made to stock |
| Management Control | Very intermittent and unpredictable demand. Should not be made to stock |
In particular it deploys powerful statistical techniques to check for trend, exceptional demands, seasonality and bias. This forecast, along with an estimate of future demand variability, is then used to calculate an inventory replenishment order designed to enable the specified level of customer service to be achieved.
By common consent the USP is LeanStock’s ability to rapidly generate results and integrate with other systems. As an Excel based system, every company has a plentiful supply of skilled people with extensive Excel knowledge. There is a multitude of forecasting systems on the market, some with inventory calculations, many with facilities focused more on sales and marketing users than on inventory managers. However, there is considerable scepticism about the degree to which any of these are fully integrated with other internal systems, even when both software products come from the same supplier.
Other qualities embodied in LeanStock are the speed of operation, user-friendliness, attractive presentation, a clear focus on customer service improvement coupled with inventory reduction, extensive use of graphs, wide application of statistical methods for efficiency, the capability to reduce the effort required to manage an inventory and a low cost model.
LeanStock Forecasting provides a Summary analysis dashboard indicating the overall system wide statictics
It also generates many statistice on the company position including high and low stock holding volumes and values at Item and overall level, Days of Stockholding (recommended vs actual), stock turns, etc,
Every Item has a forecast generated both in quantity and value terms including any seasonality or trend detected if 2 years history is provided.
Tools are also provided to aid the analysis of desired settings for Lead time, Review time, Order Quantity levels and Target Service Levels, and the impact these would have on the volume and value of the Stock that should be held to meet thse objectives. Changes to the Target Service Level for an item clearly shows the impact on Stock Turns, Weeks of Stock holding and the cost of that stock holding.
All these results can be rapidly analysed for different date periods or even aggregated by Product Groups or user defined categories (for instance sales region, customer, supplier).
Contact us if you would like to explore how LeanStock can be used in your organisation.
