Inventory Deployment

Managing inventory positioning and deployment might be as important as determining the inventory levels. Inventory positioning and deployment must be aligned in such a way that the customer delivery and supply chain operations are handled most effectively.

Positioning of products in the inventory is important for minimizing the amount of time spent to load trucks and forklifts. This becomes even more important when there are customers accepting delivery within certain time windows in certain days. By effectively positioning the products the number of moves for a forklift is also minimized.

As the means of production increased in the last decades, number of specialized products and SKUs has increased dramatically. Traditionally customer orders was used to be fulfilled completely from a single location, now these orders can be split and fulfilled from different locations. While this opportunity of splitting orders brings some benefits such as increasing fill rates and service levels, it also creates an additional complexity issue.

Big organizations having thousands of items and several stocking locations have to govern a complex supply chains. It is clearly a strategic decision to determine the item-location pairs. An inefficient pairing of items and locations might results in waste of money and resources. Companies that operate complex supply chains have use more sophisticated and analytical processes to manage the inventory deployment and positioning.

SOLVOYO Inventory Deployment Tools