Have you ever noticed that once you decide to buy a new car it seems like that particular car is at every turn on the road? But before you bought that car, you rarely saw it. Now it feels like everyone owns that car. Contrary to your belief, that is typical.

As you reflect back on the language of retail and distribution, it is interesting to see how the description has changed over the years. While the actual functional areas change, there are also new buzzwords that come about.

In this issue of View From the Ridge Mike will guide you to 8 common areas where we know there are pockets of unneeded inventory. With a deeper analysis, we can identify and eliminate the inventory that is chipping away from your bottom line.

At some point we’ve all been asked to reduce inventory and our first reaction has likely been to reduce our item’s service level settings, make Global Control adjustments, or simply stop buying. Unfortunately, these reactions tend not to produce the desired result, especially in the long term.

Coming off of BLUEPrint can be such an exhilarating and motivating time. Don’t let the daily grind keep you from the planning and goal setting you were cooking up last week. At BLUEPrint, we had a keynote speaker, Dr. Jennifer Lewis Priestley, Department of Statistics and Data Science at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, GA. Dr. Priestley was witty, engaging, smart, funny, and left us all thinking about what is truly possible with data.

First of all, what does service failure mean? Is it running out of stock? Is it not shipping all items on an order? Is it a customer that walks in to your store and can’t buy what they want or can’t get their entire basket? Once you decide what constitutes a service failure, we need to determine the cause.

We recently held BLUEPrint Nordics, our annual Blue Ridge customer event in the Nordics region. This year the conference took place at Losby Gods, a resort outside of Oslo. The event was a huge success. We had several customers present their experiences and tell how they are transforming business using Supply Chain Analytics from Blue Ridge.

If your company has a network configuration where a higher-level node, such as a national or regional distribution center, services downstream customer-facing stores or distribution centers, then you have a multi-echelon network.

If you are a wholesale or retail business contemplating better ways to manage your inventory investment, you should be thinking about inventory as one holistic investment for your enterprise. Your primary goal should be to enable the most profitable inventory investment that meets your customer service objectives.

Seasonality is present in almost everything we do and everything we are exposed to. Imagine if we dressed for the average annual temperature. Sometimes we would wear too much and other times we would not have enough. How do you think Boston would have fared if their snowfall for the past twelve months had only been based on spreading the average annual snowfall across the year? Water bills, gas bills, and even food costs can be subjected to seasonality changes. If we can accurately predict the changes that are attributed to seasonality, then we can minimize our investment in both goods and services. Ultimately, this will allow us to properly prepare for upcoming situations.