Synthesize

The stock replenishing at our central warehouses is not easy. How do you want me to be able to forecast? I only get the inventory report at the end of the week. How am I supposed to manage the fast moving products, such as light bulbs, nails, etc? Suppliers call me to ask about how much we want to order. And often, I don't have an answer. When I don't have the inventory report, I need to guess our stock levels. I don't have enough visibility. Is it so hard to send it more often? I don't need it real time, or anything. But I don't understand why we don't have a daily update. I already asked so many times for it.

I mean, last month the inventory data showed more than 45,000 electric plugs at one of our distribution centers. I called Frederik over there. He said that the maximum they ever held of that SKU had been 30,000, last year. That was before Christmas. Fortunately I didn't feed that number into our procurement system. Guess what — the following week I fetched the numbers, and we had only 12,000. Do you think we could have sold more than 30,000 in a week? No way! By the way, 12,000 is very close to our replenishing threshold. Listen, if I had trusted those numbers... I don't know. Do they not do a quality check?

I will tell you what the issue is. Mads needs to make his analysis, right? He has good tools to work with, alright. He is also good with it. That's all fine. Him and Søren are part of the team that needs to know what we have in stocks. I'm not even saying access sales data. We have multi-year agreements. We need to tell our suppliers when to deliver the quantities. So the problem is this — when do they get the data? Fridays, late afternoon. That's nonsense. It's consistently late, past deadline. They can't do miracles on a Friday, late afternoon. These delays with the reports have been going forever. Ask Ulla, from my team.

Søren and Mads are always complaining about the inventory data. Ok, I get it. They need to do their jobs. So when they get the inventory data, finally... I mean, it's like... part of the story. The other part of the story is to forecast the sales data. It's a dynamic process. You need to restock by a certain amount. So it would be good to know not only the stocks, but also the sales. The problem is that the two systems don't speak. In many cases, there is no way to establish the link. We simply don't know from the sales data what inventory units does it correspond to. Isn't that crazy?

I like reports that I can understand in 30 seconds. For me, a report needs to be well organized. I have dozens of reports to read every week. Some are concise, well presented. Sales and inventory reports are not. I seldom read them. They are messy. The layout seems to come straight from the 90s. 30 years ago, we used to have reports like that. Nowadays, I would expect a better formatting. I am speaking about small things — the size and spacing of the fonts, the page structure, reorganizing the sections. I thing these reports definitely need improvement.

I have been here long time. This is my life, and this is my time. It's a fast paced environment. Regarding your question on the sales and inventory reports, I see constantly data that doesn't make any sense. Show me the light, and I go there. I commented with Ulla and she agreed. For example, there is no point in having the cold logs in the inventory report. No one needs to know that. And for the sales data, why do we need all the customer segmentation? It's irrelevant. It just adds unnecessary complexity. This is my life, and I don't care.

The inventory and sales reports have several issues. One of them is that the exceptions are hard to identify. If you don't play close attention, you miss them. That happens both for inventory and sales. The other day, Ulla didn't realize that ink cartiges were on sale. That was in a footnote comment. So she didn't account for that in her spreadsheet. There are often exceptions like that. So they should be made more recognizable. Several people have commented that they would like to have the exception highlighted. That would ensure no one would miss them.