Inventory Analysis

Thrive provides extensive Inventory Analysis as part of the application, plus the ability to easily modify existing reports, dashboards, and graphs or set up new ones.  Thrive also provides Inventory Analysis Services for companies who have specific analysis projects.  Inventory is like a living thing in that it can change quickly within days and requires consistent management.  Thrive provides a very efficient intelligent inventory analysis system that helps both buyers and managers.  It alerts buyers and planners to proactively discover and resolve potential issues before they would normally be detected.  Thrive Inventory Analysis helps managers ensure inventory policies and practices are hitting strategic goals, and will provide drilldown detail if there are issues.  For example, it will notify managers when metrics like inventory turns drop below a user defined tolerance for a product family, or when service levels have dropped for 3 straight weeks in a row.

Inventory Analysis: Key Performance Indicators

Thrive calculates and displays Inventory Performance KPI’s so you can monitor and proactively manage your inventory performance. Some sample metrics include projected inventory turns, service levels, safety stock dollars, lost sales dollars due to stockouts..

Inventory Analysis: Out of Stocks

Out of Stocks are due to a finite number of reasons. Thrive Inventory Analysis will tell you why you are stocking out. Is it because your buyers are not placing orders in a timely fashion? Is it because your vendors are not delivering when they say they will? Is it because you are having a lot of unpredicted large sales? A very common cause is ERP systems that use moving averages to calculate buy quantities in front of a busy season but the moving average uses the average from the months when you were not busy.

Inventory Analysis: Overstocks

Thrive Inventory Analysis analyzes which items are overstocked and why.  Are the buyers buying too infrequently?  Is it because the vendor minimums are very large?  Do the buyers not have visibility to items where demand is dropping so they continue to buy at historic levels that are not appropriate now?  Historically, has your overstocking occurred during certain times of the year (eg.  because your host ERP system uses moving averages to generate forecasts and purchase quantities at the end of a season that will come in when you are out of season).

Inventory Analysis: Trends

Trend analysis is a very important tool for measuring and improving your inventory performance. Once KPI’s are set up and being measured, Thrive’s Inventory Analysis provides an automated way for you to see how your inventory performance is trending and be alerted when certain metrics are dropping beyond a user defined tolerance. For example, you can see if your overstock inventory dollars are trending down or up. You can then drill down to see which categories are the culprits, which buyers, which items, etc.