Service level vs. Fill Rate and Implications on Inventory Planning

The Smart Forecaster

Pursuing best practices in demand planning, forecasting and inventory optimization

We are often asked what the difference is between these two important performance metrics for inventory planning. While they are both important for measuring how successful a business is in meeting demand, their meaning is very different. If not understood and incorporated into the strategic inventory planning process, inventory will be inefficiently allocated resulting in lower customer service and higher carrying costs. We’ve illustrated the difference in this 4 minute recording using Microsoft Excel.

Smart Operational Analytics automatically calculates historical service levels & fill rates across any item. To see how you calculate these and other operational metrics including inventory turns, supplier performance, and more register below to watch a five minute demonstration. The demo will show how our cloud platform continuously calculates and reports these metrics across thousands of items helping you identify opportunities for service level improvement and inventory reduction.

Top 3 Most Common Inventory Control Policies

To make the right decision, you’ll need to know how demand forecasting supports inventory management, choice of which policy to use, and calculation of the inputs that drive these policies.The process of ordering replenishment stock is sufficiently expensive and cumbersome that you also want to minimize the number of purchase orders you must generate.

Ten Tips that Avoid Data Problems in Software Implementation

Once a customer is ready to implement software for demand planning and/or inventory optimization, they need to connect the analytics software to their corporate data stream.This provides information on item demand and supplier lead times, among other things. We extract the rest of the data from the ERP system itself, which provides metadata such as each item’s location, unit cost, and product group.

Infrequent Updates to Inventory Planning Parameters Costs Time, Money, and Hurts Service

Inventory planning parameters such as safety stock levels, reorder points, Min/Max settings, lead times, order quantities, and DDMRP buffers directly impact inventory spending and ability to meet customer demand. Ensuring that these inputs are optimized regularly will dramatically improve customer service levels and will reduce the amount of unnecessary inventory spending.

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Continuously update your inventory control parameters: reorder points, order quantities, safety stocks, mins, maxes, lead times. Beyond that, you should be updating your inventory strategies. […]
Top 3 Most Common Inventory Control Policies
To make the right decision, you’ll need to know how demand forecasting supports inventory management, choice of which policy to use, and calculation of the inputs that drive these policies.The process of ordering replenishment stock is sufficiently expensive and cumbersome that you also want to minimize the number of purchase orders you must generate. […]