Summary
The Executive Summary dashboards provide a high-level view of the health of the business. This article walks through the various charts, graphs and values on the Executive Summary screen.
Tab Descriptions
Overview
The goal of the overview/home section is to provide a high level summary of the health of the business.
- On Hand - Shows the on-hand value and items
- Open Supply Orders - Open supply orders, value in transit, and number of open lines.
- Stock Outs - Overview of stockouts (click for details)
- Excess - Overview of Excess (click for details)
- Dead - Overview of dead items (click for details)
- Slow - Overview of slow moving items (click for details)
The Inventory Over Time chart shows your on-hand-value of inventory over time, overlaid with StockIQ's recommended min and max ranges. Blue bars indicate what percent of revenue your inventory represents - 20-25% is a good target to shoot for. These values are first-of-month snapshots.
TIP: Use the filters to see this chart filtered down by different chunks of the business, such as individual sites, A/B/C items, and so on.
The Service Level Over Time chart displays SL over time that we are measuring. If this is blank, make sure that the correct setting is in the Global Service Level Settings for the data we have.
The Turns over Time chart records your turns performance as time goes on, starting with your average turns compared to your target turns. You can show/hide series by clicking them, such as adding Current Turns to the chart if you wish.
Current Inventory Position and Usage Pattern charts show the breakdown of your inventory position and usage patterns by item counts.
Stratification
The Stratification tab attempts to help separate your inventory into some groups for quick analysis.
Charts showing your breakdown by ABC, XYZ, Inventory Position, and Usage Patterns are at the top.
This same ABC, Inventory Position, and Usage Pattern information over time is shown below, so you can see how your product mix and performance is changing.
At the bottom, tables of data for these same breakdowns are available in each tab, including quantities, balance/value, and related information like COGS, Hits, Revenue, and Margin data, along with the associated Turns for each cohort of product.
Weeks of Supply
The weeks of supply overview provides some high level information about the weeks of supply of inventory across the business. This can be filtered down to different sites or product group using the filters.
The Summary chart shows current weeks of supply, by inventory dollars, bucketed by how many weeks of supply those items have, and a summary grid shows the information in tabular format at right. The number in each SKUs in each bucket is displayed as well, to see if any issue is due to a few high value items, or many low-value items.
A detail grid at the bottom allows further manipulation of this and further details like expected burndown information, here is some additional information about some of the data columns.
- Annualized Usage - Since this display can involve items that either have no current forecast, or are in order policies not using forecast, StockIQ calculates an annualized usage for that item using either forecast (if present and applicable), or last 12 months of actual demand and dependent usage when forecast does not apply. If a stocking order policy, which uses forecast, such as Order Point or Lot for Lot is in use, the next 12 months of forecast is used to determine the item's average usage. Non-Stock policies, such as Buy To Order, or those that do not trust/make use of the forecast, such as Sporadic or Min/Max, use the previous 12 months of demand to determine the average usage.
- Effective Burndown Daily Usage - From the special annualized usage, we show an effective daily usage number as well, for reference. Note this is calculated from the annualized usage above, and isn't related to the usual historical/current/@ lead time daily usages seen throughout the rest of StockIQ.
- Weeks of Supply - Shows the estimated weeks of supply for that item, based on the annualized usage calculated above.
- Months of Supply - Using the same demand rules as above, shows the Months of Supply for this item.
- On Hand Balance - The current value of the inventory on hand of the item.
- Estimated Balance in 1 Year - based on your usage of this item, if you have no additional supply (e.g. PO's) of this item, how much of this inventory will you have burned through in one year? This maps to what you see in the "Burn Down" screen (see below)
Burn Down
Burn down refers to how quickly it is anticipated that inventory might burn down, given the information currently in StockIQ, such as the forecasted demand and historical demand.
Burn Down is predicted using 12-month forecast (independent and dependent) for items where the order policy is one that uses forecast, and uses 12-month demand history (independent and dependent) for items where the order policy does not use forecast (such as Buy To Order, Min/Max, etc.)
Ideally, this chart will show a one-year burn down with many items achieving their target levels within 18-24 months, indicating that overstocks are, at least, manageable.
Last Used
Last used starts to look more closely at the stock on hand and if it has the potential to move. If many items have not been used for very long periods of time and represent large quantities of inventory, then this is a sign some write-offs are required.
Revenue By Usage Pattern
Revenue by usage pattern is an indication of where this revenue is coming from. Ideally, revenue is coming from recurring items, which are predictable and portend solid continued earnings. If a large percentage of revenue is coming from sporadic or slow items, this can add some uncertainty to the health of the business's product line.
Opportunity Vs Investment
Shows where the inventory stands in relation to the target inventory levels. Opportunity is your opportunity for inventory reduction, e.g. you have inventory ABOVE the Target Inventory level, whereas investment represents items where the inventory level is BELOW target inventory level, and therefore cash that must be injected into the business in order to reach target inventory levels, and in turn service level.
For a normal item being planned appropriately, on average you would expect that it would be above its target inventory 50% of the time, and below its target inventory 50% of the time. So, if, for any of your opportunity by A/B/C lines, you see that there is a large skew in the chart, where opportunity and investment are far different from each other, then this indicates those items are not being planned appropriately. For example, if you see your C items have $25,000,000 in Opportunity, but only $5,000,000 in Investment, this means that you are, in general, drastically overstocked on your C items.
The Inventory Totals chart also gives you a breakdown of where your inventory is sitting by inventory position. Large chunks in the Excess and "Overstock" categories will help illustrate where inventory savings should be coming from.