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.

Protect your Demand Planning Process from Regime Change

No, not that kind of regime change: Nothing here about cruise missiles and stealth bombers. And no, we’re not talking about the other kind of regime change that hits closer to home: Shuffling the C-Suite at your company. In this blog, we discuss the relevance of regime change on time series data used for demand planning and forecasting.

Don’t Become a Victim of Your Forecast Models

Generally, the supply chain field has lagged behind finance in terms of the use of statistical models. My university colleagues and I are chipping away at that, but we have a long way to go. Some supply chains are quite technically sophisticated, but many, perhaps more, are essentially managed as much by gut instinct as by the numbers. Is this avoidance of analytics safer than relying on models?

Reveal Your Real Inventory Planning and Forecasting Policy by Answering These 9 Questions

In this blog, we review 9 specific questions you can ask to uncover what’s really happening with the inventory planning and demand forecasting policy at your company. We detail the typical answers provided when a forecasting/inventory planning policy doesn’t really exist, explain how to interpret these answers, and offer some clear advice on what to do about it.