This blog defines and compares the three most commonly used inventory control policies. It should be helpful both to those new to the field and also to experienced people contemplating a possible change in their company’s policy. The blog also considers how demand forecasting supports inventory management, choice of which policy to use, and calculation of the inputs that drive these policies. Think of it as an abbreviated piece of Inventory 101.

Scenario

You are managing a particular item. The item is important enough to your customers that you want to carry enough inventory to avoid stocking out. However, the item is also expensive enough that you also want to minimize the amount of cash tied up in inventory. 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. Demand for the item is unpredictable.  So is the replenishment lead time between when you detect the need for more and when it arrives on the shelf ready for use or shipment. 

Your question is “How do I manage this item? How do I decide when to order more and how much to order?”  When making this decision there are different approaches you can use.  This blog outlines the most commonly used inventory planning policies:  Periodic Order Up To (T, S), Reorder Point/Order Quantity (R, Q), and Min/Max (s, S).  These approaches are often embedded in ERP systems and enable companies to generate automatic suggestions of what and when to order.  To make the right decision, you’ll need to know how each of these approaches are designed to work and the advantages and limitations of each approach.    

Periodic review, order-up-to policy

The shorthand notation for this policy is (T, S), where T is the fixed time between orders and S is the order-up-to-level.

When to order: Orders are placed like clockwork every T days. The used of a fixed reorder interval is helpful to firms that cannot keep track of their inventory level in real time or who prefer to issue orders to suppliers at scheduled intervals.

How much to order: The inventory level is measured and the gap computed between that level and the order-up-to level S. If the inventory level is 7 units and S = 10, then 3 units are ordered.

Comment: This is the simplest policy to implement but also the least agile in responding to fluctuations in demand and/or lead time. Also, note that, while the order size would be adequate to return the inventory level to S if replenishment were immediate, in practice there will be some replenishment delay during which time the inventory continues to drop, so the inventory level will rarely reach all the way up S.

Continuous review, fixed order quantity policy (Reorder Point, Order Quantity)

The shorthand notation for this policy is (R, Q), where R is the reorder point and Q is the fixed order quantity.

When to order: Orders are placed as soon as the inventory drops to or below the reorder point, R. In theory, the inventory level is checked constantly, but in practice it is usually checked periodically at the beginning or end of each workday. 

How much to order: The order size is always fixed at Q units.

Comment: (R, Q) is more responsive than (S, T) because it reacts more quickly to signs of imminent stockout. The value of the fixed order quantity Q may not be entirely up to you. Often suppliers can dictate terms that restrict your choice of Q to values compatible with minima and multiples. For example, a supplier may insist on an order minimum of 20 units and always be a multiple of 5. Thus orders sizes must be either 20, 25, 30, 35, etc. (This comment also applied to the two other inventory policies.)

Continuous review, order-up-to policy (Min/Max)

The shorthand notation for this policy is (s, S), sometimes called “little s, big S” where s is the reorder point and S is the order-up-to level. This policy is more commonly called (Min, Max).

When to order: Orders are placed as soon as the inventory drops to or below the Min. As with (R, Q), the inventory level is supposedly monitored constantly, but in practice it is usually checked at the end of each workday. 

How much to order: The order size varies. It equals the gap between the Max and the current inventory at the moment that the Min is reached or breached.

Comment: (Min, Max) is even more responsive than (R, Q) because it adjusts the order size to take account of how much the inventory has fallen below the Min. When demand is either zero or one units, a common variation sets Min = Max -1; this is called the “base stock policy.”

Another policy choice: What happens if I stock out?

As you can imagine, each policy is likely to lead to a different temporal sequence of inventory levels (see Figure 1 below). There is another factor that influences how events play out over time: the policy you select for dealing with stockouts. Broadly speaking, there are two main approaches.

Backorder policy: If you stock out, you keep track of the order and fill it later.  Under this policy, it is sensible to speak of negative inventory. The negative inventory represents the number of backorders that need to be filled. Presumably, any customer forced to wait gets first dibs when replenishment arrives. You are likely to have a backorder policy on items that are unique to your business that your customer cannot purchase elsewhere.

Loss policy: If you stock out, the customer turns to another source to fill their order. When replenishment arrives, some new customer will get those new units. Inventory can never go below zero.  Choose this policy for commodity items that can easily be purchased from a competitor.  If you don’t have it in stock, your customer will most certainly go elsewhere. 

The role of demand forecasting in inventory control

Choice of control parameters, such as the values of Min and Max, requires inputs from some sort of demand forecasting process.

Traditionally, this has meant determining the probability distribution of the number of units that will be demanded over a fixed time interval, either the lead time in (R, Q) and (Min, Max) systems or T + lead time in (T, S) systems. This distribution has been assumed to be Normal (the famous “bell-shaped curve”).  Traditional methods have been expanded where the demand distribution isn’t assumed to be normal but some other distribution (i.e. Poisson, negative binomial, etc.) 

These traditional methodologies have several deficiencies.

• First, it usually ignores the problem of undershoot, in which demand drops inventory not just to the reorder point but below it. Assuming no undershoot leads to overestimates of service levels and fill rates.

• Second, the probability distribution of demand is very often not even close to “bell-shaped” or whatever assumed distribution was selected –  especially for items with intermittent demand such as spares and service parts.

• Third, accurate estimates of inventory operating costs require analysis of the entire replenishment cycle (from one replenishment to the next), not merely the part of the cycle that begins with inventory hitting the reorder point.

• Finally, replenishment lead times are typically unpredictable or random, not fixed. Many models assume a fixed lead time based on an average, vendor quoted lead time, or average lead time + safety time.

Fortunately, better inventory planning and inventory optimization software exists based on generating a full range of random demand scenarios, together with random lead times. These scenarios “stress test” any proposed pair of inventory control parameters and assess their expected performance. Users can not only choose between policies (i.e. Min, Max vs. R, Q) but also determine which variation of the proposed policy is best (i.e. Min, Max of 10,20 vs. 15, 25, etc.) Examples of these scenarios are given below.

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

Choosing among inventory control policies

Which policy is right for you? There is a clear pecking order in terms of item availability, with (Min, Max) first, (R, Q) second, and (T, S) last. This order derives from the responsiveness of the policy to fluctuations in the randomness of demand and replenishment. The order reverses when considering ease of implementation.

How do you “score” the performance of an inventory policy? There are two opposing forces that must be balanced: cost and service.

Inventory cost can be expressed either as inventory investment or inventory operating cost. The former is the dollar value of the items waiting around to be used. The latter is the sum of three components: holding cost (the cost of the “care and feeding of stuff on the shelf”), ordering cost (basically the cost of cutting a purchase order and receiving that order), and shortage cost (the penalty you pay when you either lose a sale or force a customer to wait for what they want).

Service is usually measured by service level and fill rate.  Service level is the probability that an item requested is shipped immediately from stock. Fill rate is the proportion of units demanded that are shipped immediately from stock. As a former professor, I think of service level as an all-or-nothing grade: If a customer needs 10 units and you can provide only 9, that’s an F. Fill rate is a partial credit grade: 9 out of 10 is 90%.

When you decide on the values of inventory control policies, you are striking a balance between cost and service. You can provide perfect service by keeping an infinite inventory. You can hold costs to zero by keeping no inventory. You must find a sensible place to operate between these two ridiculous extremes. Generating and analyzing demand scenarios can quantify the consequences of your choices.

A demonstration of the differences between two inventory control policies

We now show how on-hand inventory evolves differently under two policies. The two policies are (R, Q) and (Min, Max) with backorders allowed. To keep the comparison fair, we set Min = R and Max = R+Q, use a fixed lead time of five days, and subject both policies to the same sequence of daily demands over 365 simulated days of operation.

Figure 1 shows daily on-hand inventory under the two policies subjected to the same pattern of daily demand. In this example, the (Min, Max) policy has only two periods of negative inventory during the year, while the (R, Q) policy has three. The (Min, Max) policy also operates with a smaller average number of units on hand. Different demand sequences will produce different results, but in general the (Min, Max) policy performs better.

Note that the plots of on-hand inventory contain information needed to compute both cost and availability metrics.

Figure 1: Comparison of daily on-hand inventory under two inventory policies

Role of Inventory Planning Software

Best of Breed Inventory Planning, Forecasting, and Optimization systems can help you determine which type of policy (is it better to use Min/Max over R,Q) and what sets of inputs are optimal (i.e. what should I enter for Min and Max).  Best of breed inventory planning and demand forecasting systems can help you develop these optimized inputs so that you can regularly populate and update your ERP systems with accurate replenishment drivers.

Summary

We defined and described the three most commonly used inventory control policies: (T, S), (R, Q) and (Min, Max), along with the two most common responses to stockouts: backorders or lost orders. We noted that these policies require successively greater effort to implement but also have successively better average performance. We highlighted the role of demand forecasts in assessing inventory control policies. Finally, we illustrated how choice of policy influences the day-to-day level of on-hand inventory.

Summary

Setting a target service level or fill rate is a strategic decision about inventory risk management. Choosing service levels can be difficult. Relevant factors include current service levels, replenishment lead times, cost constraints, the pain inflicted by shortages on you and your customers, and your competitive position. Target setting is often best approached as a collaboration among operations, sales and finance. Inventory optimization software is an essential tool in the process.

Service Level Choices

Service level is the probability that no shortages occur between when you order more stock and when it arrives on the shelf. The reasonable range of service levels is from about 70% to 99%. Levels below 70% may signal that you don’t care about or can’t handle your customers. Levels of 100% are almost never appropriate and usually indicate a hugely bloated inventory.

Factors Influencing Choice of Service Level

Several factors influence the choice of service level for an inventory item. Here are some of the more important.

Current service levels:
A reasonable place to start is to find out what your current service levels are for each item and overall. If you are already in good shape, then the job becomes the easier one of tweaking an already-good solution. If you are in bad shape now, then setting service levels can be more difficult. Surprisingly few companies have data on this important metric across their whole fleet of inventory items. What often happens is that reorder points grow willy-nilly from choices made in corporate pre-history and are rarely, sometimes never, systematically reviewed and updated. Since reorder points are a major determinant of service levels, it follows that service levels “just happen”. Inventory optimization software can convert your current reorder points and lead times into solid estimates of your current service levels. This analysis often reveals subset of items with service levels either too high or too low, in which case you have guidance about which items to adjust down or up, respectively.

Replenishment lead times:
Some companies adjust service levels to match replenishment lead times. If it takes a long time to make or buy an item, then it takes a long time to recover from a shortage. Accordingly, they bump up service levels on long-lead-time items and reduce them on items for which backlogs will be brief.

Cost constraints:
Inventory optimization software can find the lowest-cost ways to hit high service level targets, but aggressive targets inevitably imply higher costs. You may find that costs constrain your choice of service level targets. Costs come in various flavors. “Inventory investment” is the dollar value of inventory. “Operating costs” include both holding costs and ordering costs. Constraints on inventory investment are often imposed on inventory executives and always imply ceilings on service level targets; software can make these relationships explicit but not take away the necessity of choice. It is less common to hear of ceilings on operating costs, but they are always at least a secondary factor arguing for lower service levels.

Shortage costs:
Shortage costs depend on whether your shortage policy calls for backorders or lost sales. In either case, shortage costs work counter to inventory investment and operating costs by arguing for higher service levels. These costs may not always be expressed in dollar terms, as in the case of medical/surgical supplies, where shortage costs are denominated in morbidity and mortality.

Competition:
The closer your company is to dominating its market, the more you can ease back on service levels to save money. However, easing back too far carries risks: It encourages potential customers to look elsewhere, and it encourages competitors. Conversely, high product availability can go far to bolstering the position of a minor player.

Collaborative Targeting

Inventory executives may be the ones tasked with setting service level targets, but it may be best to collaborate with other functions when making these calls. Finance can share any “red lines” early in the process, and they should be tasked with estimating holding and ordering costs. Sales can help with estimating shortage costs by explaining likely customer reactions to backlogs or lost sales.

The Role of Inventory Optimization and Planning Software

Without inventory optimization software, setting service level targets is pure guesswork: It is impossible to know how any given target will play out in terms of inventory investment, operating costs, shortage costs. The software can compute the detailed, quantitative tradeoff curves required to make informed choices or even recommend the target service level that results in the lowest overall cost considering holding costs, ordering costs, and stock out costs. However, not all software solutions are created equal. You might enter a user defined 99% service level into your inventory planning system or the system could recommend a target service – but it doesn’t mean you will actually hit that stated service level. In fact, you might not even come close to hitting it and achieve a much lower service level. We’ve observed situations where a targeted service level of 99% actually achieved a service level of just 82%! Any decisions made as a result of the target will result in unintended misallocation of inventory, very costly consequences, and lots of explaining to do.So be sure to check out our blog article on how to measure the accuracy of your service level forecast so you don’t make this costly mistake.

In another blog we posed the question:  How can you be sure that you really have a policy for inventory planning and demand forecasting? We explained how an organization’s lack of understanding on the basics (how a forecast is created, how safety stock buffers are determined, and how/why these values are adjusted) contributes to poor forecast accuracy, misallocated inventory, and lack of trust in the whole process.

In this blog, we review 10 specific questions you can ask to uncover what’s really happening 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.

Always start with a simple hypothetical example. Focusing on a specific problem you just experienced is bound to provoke defensive answers that hide the full story. The goal is to uncover the actual approach used to plan inventory and forecasts that has been baked into the mental math or spreadsheets.   Here is an example:

Suppose you have 100 units on hand, the lead time to replenish is 3 months, and the average monthly demand is 20 units?   When should you order more?  How much would you order? How will your answer change if expected receipts of 10 per month were scheduled to arrive?  How will your answer change if the item is the item is an A, B, or C item, the cost of the item is high or low, lead time of the item is long or short?  Simply put, when you schedule a production job or place a new order with a supplier, why did you do it? What triggered the decision to get more?  What planning inputs were considered?

When getting answers to the above question, focus on uncovering answers to the following questions:

1. What is the underlying replenishment approach? This will typically be one of Min/Max, forecast/safety stock, Reorder Point/Order Quantity, Periodic Review/Order Up To or even some odd combination

2. How are the planning parameters, such as demand forecasts, reorder points, or Min/Max, actually calculated? It’s not enough to know that you use Min/Max.  You have to know exactly how these values are calculated. Answers such as “We use history” or “We use an average” are not specific enough.   You’ll need answers that clearly outline how history is used.  For example, “We take an average of the last 6 months, divide that by 30 to get a daily average, and then multiply that by the lead time in days.  For ‘A’ items we then multiply the lead time average by 2 and for ‘B’ items we use a multiplier of 1.5.” (While that is not an especially good technical approach, at least it has a clear logic.)

Once you have a policy well-defined, you can identify its weaknesses in order to improve it.  But if the answer provided doesn’t get much further past “We use history”, then you don’t have a policy to start with.   Answers will often reveal that different planners use history in different ways.  Some may only consider the most recent demand, others might stock according to the average of the highest demand periods, etc.  In other words, you may find that you actually have multiple ill-conceived “policies”.

3. Are forecasts used to drive replenishment planning and if so, how? Many companies will say they forecast, but their forecasts are calculated and used differently. Is the forecast used to predict what on hand inventory will be in the future, resulting in an order being triggered?  Or is it used to derive a reorder point but not to predict when to order (i.e. I predict we’ll sell 10 a week so to help protect against stock out, I’ll order more when on hand gets to 15)? Is it used as a guide for the planner to help subjectively determine when they should order more?  Is it used to set up blanket orders with suppliers?  Some use it to drive MRP. You’ll need to know these specifics.  A thorough answer to this question might look like this: “My forecast is 10 per week and my lead time is 3 weeks so I make my reorder point a multiple of that forecast, typically 2 x lead time demand or 60 unit for important items and I use a smaller multiple for less important items.  (Again, not a great technical approach, but clear.)

4.  What technique is actually used to generate the forecast? Is it an average, a trending model such as double exponential smoothing, a seasonal model? Does the choice of technique change depend on the type of demand data or when new demand data is available? (Spare parts and high-volume items have very different demand patterns.) How do you go about selecting the forecast model? Is this process automated?  How often is the choice of model reconsidered?  How often are the model parameters recomputed? What is the process used to reconsider your approach?  The answer here documents how the baseline forecasts are produced.  Once determined, you can conduct an analysis to identify whether other forecasting methods would improve forecast accuracy.  If you aren’t documenting forecast accuracy and conducting “forecast value add” analysis then you aren’t in a position to properly assess whether the forecasts being produced are the best that they can be.  You’ll miss out on opportunities to improve the process, increase forecast accuracy, and educate the business on what type of forecast error is normal and should be expected.

5. How do you use safety stock? Notice the question was not “Do you use safety stock?” In this context, and to keep it simple, the term “safety stock” means stock used to buffer inventory against supply and demand variability.  All companies use buffering approaches in some way.  There are some exceptions though.  Maybe you are a job shop manufacturer that procures all parts to order and your customers are completely fine waiting weeks or months for you to source material, manufacture, QA, and ship.  Or maybe you are high-volume manufacturer with tons of buying power so your suppliers set up local warehouses that are stocked full and ready to provide inventory to you almost immediately.  If these descriptions don’t describe your company, you will definitely have some sort of buffer to protect against demand and supply variability.  You may not use the “safety stock” field in your ERP but you are definitely buffering.

Answers might be provided such as “We don’t use safety stock because we forecast.”  Unfortunately, a good forecast will have a 50/50 chance of being over/under the actual demand.  This means you’ll incur a stock out 50% of the time without a safety stock buffer added to the forecast.  Forecasts are only perfect when there is no randomness. Since there is always randomness, you’ll need to buffer if you don’t want to have abysmal service levels.

If the answer isn’t revealed, you can probe a bit more into how the varying replenishment levers are used to add possible buffers which leads to questions 6 & 7.

6. Do you ever increase the lead time or order earlier than you truly need to?
In our hypothetical example, your supplier typically takes 4 weeks to deliver and is pretty consistent. But to protect against stockouts your buyer routinely orders 6 weeks out instead of 4 weeks.  The safety stock field in your ERP system might be set to zero because “we don’t use safety stock”, but in reality, the buyer’s ordering approach just added 2 weeks of buffer stock.

7. Do you pad the demand forecast?
In our example, the planner expects to consume 10 units per month but “just in case” enters a forecast of 20 per month.  The safety stock field in the MRP system is left blank but the now disguised buffer stock has been smuggled into the demand forecast.  This is a mistake that introduces “forecast bias.”  Not only will your forecasts be less accurate but if the bias isn’t accounted for and safety stock is added by other departments, you will overstock.

The ad-hoc nature of the above approaches compounds the problems by not considering the actual demand or supply variability of the item. For example, the planner might simply make a rule of thumb that doubles the lead time forecast for important items.  One-size doesn’t fit all when it comes to inventory management.  This approach will substantially overstock the predictable items while substantially understocking the intermittently demanded items. You can read “Beware of Simple Rules of Thumb for Managing Inventory” to learn more about why this type of approach is so costly.

The ad-hoc nature of the approaches also ignores what happens the company is faced with a huge overstock or stock out. When trying to understand what happened, the stated policies will be examined. In the case of an overstock, the system will show zero safety stock.  The business leaders will assume they aren’t carrying any safety stock, scratch their heads, and eventually just blame the forecast, declare “Our business can’t be forecasted” and stumble on. They may even blame the supplier for shipping too early and making them hold more than needed. In the case of a stock out, they will think they aren’t carrying enough and arbitrarily add more stock across many items not realizing there is in fact lots of extra safety stock baked into process.  This makes it more likely inventory will need to be written off in the future.

8. What is the exact inventory terminology used? Define what you mean by safety stock, Min, reorder point, EOQ, etc.  While there are standard technical definitions it’s possible that something differs, and miscommunication here will be problematic.  For example, some companies refer to Min as the amount of inventory needed to satisfy lead time demand while some may define Min as inclusive of both lead time demand and safety stock to buffer against demand variability. Others may mean the minimum order quantity.

9. Is on hand inventory consistent with the policy? When your detective work is done and everything is documented, open your spreadsheet or ERP system and look at the on-hand quantity. It should be more or less in line with your planning parameters (i.e. if Min/Max is 20/40 and typical lead time demand is 10, then you should have roughly 10 to 40 units on hand at any given point in time.  Surprisingly, for many companies there is often a huge inconsistency. We have observed situations where the Min/Max setting is 20/40 but the on-hand inventory is 300+.  This indicates that whatever policy has been prescribed just isn’t being followed.   That’s a bigger problem.

10. What are you going to do next?

Demand forecasting and inventory stocking policy need to be well-defined processes that are understood and accepted by everybody involved.  There should be zero mystery.

To do this right, the demand and supply variability must be analyzed and used to compute the proper levels of safety stock.   Adding buffers without an implicit understanding of what each additional unit of buffer stock is buying you in terms of service is like arbitrarily throwing a handful of ingredients into a cake recipe.  A small change in ingredients can have a huge impact on what comes out of the oven – one bite too sweet but the next too sour.  It is the same with inventory management.  A little extra here, a little less there, and pretty soon you find yourself with costly excess inventory in some areas, painful shortages in others, no idea how you got there, and with little guidance on how to make things better.

Modern inventory optimization and demand planning software with its advanced analytics and strong basis in forecast analysis can help a good deal with this problem. But even the best software won’t help if it is used inconsistently.

What We’re Up Against

As a third-generation Boston Red Sox fan, I’m disinclined to take advice from any New York Yankee ballplayer, even a great one but have to agree that sometimes, you just need to make a decision.   However, wouldn’t it be better if we knew the tradeoffs associated with each decision. Perhaps one road is more scenic but takes longer while the other is more direct but boring. Then you wouldn’t have to simply “take it” but could make an informed decision based on the advantages/disadvantages of each approach.

In the supply chain planning world, the most fundamental decision is how to balance item availability against the cost of maintaining that availability (service levels and fill rates). At one extreme, you can grossly overstock and never run out until you go broke and have to close up shop from sinking all your cash into inventory that doesn’t sell.  At the other extreme, you can grossly understock and save a bundle on inventory holding costs but go broke and have to close up shop because all your customers took their business elsewhere.

There is no escaping this fundamental tension. They way to survive and thrive is to find a productive and sustainable balance. To do that requires fact-based tradeoffs based on the numbers. To get the numbers requires software.

The general drift of things is obvious. If you decide to keep more inventory, you will have more Holding Costs, lower Shortage Costs, and possibly lower Ordering Costs. Whether this costs or saves money is impossible to know without some sophisticated analysis, but usually the result is that the Total Cost goes up. But if you do invest in more inventory, something will be gained, because you will offer your customers higher Service Levels and Fill Rates. How much higher requires, as you might guess, some sophisticated analysis.

Show Me the Numbers

This blog lays out what such an analysis looks like. There is no universal solution pointing you to the “right” decision. You might think that the right decision is the one that does best by your bottom line. But to get those numbers, you would need something rarely seen: an accurate model of customer behavior with regard to service level (check out our article “How to choose a target service level”) For example, at what point will a customer walk away and take their business elsewhere?  Will it be after you stock out 1% of the time, 5% of time, 10% of the time? Will you still keep their business as long as you fill back orders quickly?  Will it be after a back order of 1 day, 2 days? 3 weeks? Will it be after this happens one time on one an important part or many times across many parts?  While modeling the precise service level that will allow you to keep your customer while minimizing costs seems like an unapproachable ideal, another type of sophisticated analysis is more pragmatic. 

Inventory optimization and forecasting software can factor all associated costs such as the cost of stocking out, cost of holding inventory, and cost of ordering inventory in order to prescribe an optimal service level target that yields the lowest total cost. However, even that “optimal” service level is sensitive to changes in the costs making the results potentially questionable.  For example, if you don’t accurately estimate the precise costs (shortage costs are the most difficult) it will be tough to definitely state something like “If I increase my on-hand inventory by an average of one unit for all items in an important product family, my company will see a net gain of $170,500.  That gain increases until I get to 4 units.  At 4 units and higher, the return declines due to excessive holding costs. So, the best decision factoring projected holding, ordering, and stockout is to increase inventory by 3 units to see a net gain of over $500,000.  

Short of that ideal, you can do something that is simpler yet still extremely valuable: Quantify the tradeoff curve between inventory cost and item availability. While you won’t necessarily know the service level you should target, you will know the costs of varying service levels.  Then you can earn your big bucks by finding a good place to be on that tradeoff curve and communicating where you at risk, where you aren’t, and setting expectations with customers and internal stakeholders.  Without the tradeoff curve to guide you, you are flying blind with no way to rationally modify stocking policy.

A Scenario to Learn From

Let’s sketch out a realistic tradeoff curve. We start with a scenario requiring a management decision. The scenario we will use and associated assumptions about demand, lead times, and costs are detailed below:

Inventory Policy

• Periodic review – Reorder decisions made every 30 days
• Order-Up-To-Level (“S”) – Varied from 30 to 60 units
• Shortage Policy – Allow backorders, no lost orders

Demand

• Demand is intermittent
• Average = 0.8 units per day
• Standard deviation = 1.2 units per day
• Largest demand in a year ≈ 9
• % of days with no demand = 53%

Lead Time

• Random at either 7, 14 or 21 days with probabilities 70%, 20% and 10%, respectively

Cost Parameters

• Holding cost = $1 per day
• Ordering Cost = $10 per order without regard to size of order
• Shortage Cost = $100 per unit not immediately shipped from stock

We imagine an inventory control policy that is known in the trade as a “periodic review” or (T,S) policy. In this instance, the Review Period (“T”) is 30 days, meaning that every 30 days the inventory position is checked and an ordering decision is made. The order quantity is the difference between the observed number of units on hand and the Order-Up-To Quantity (“S”). So, if the end-of-month inventory is 12 units and S = 20, the order quantity would be S – 12 = 20 -1 2 = 8. The next month, the order quantity is likely to be different. If the inventory ever goes negative (backorders) during a review period, the next order tries to restore equilibrium by ordering more in order to fill those backorders. For example, if the inventory is -5 (meaning 5 units ordered by not available for shipping, the next order would be S – (-5) = S + 5. Details of the hypothetical demand stream, supplier lead times, and cost elements are shown in Figure 1 below. Figure 2 show a sample of daily demand and daily inventory over five review periods. Demand is intermittent, as is often true for spare parts, and therefore difficult to plan for.

Figure 1: Different choices of inventory policy (order up to), associated costs, and service levels

Figure 2: Details of five months of system operation given one of the polices

Inventory Planning Software Is Our Friend

Software encodes the logic of the operation of the (T,S) system, generates many hypothetical but realistic demand scenarios, calculates how each of those scenarios plays out, then looks back on the simulated operation (here, 10 years or 3,650 consecutive days) to calculate cost and performance metrics.

To reveal the tradeoff curve, we ran several computational experiments in which we varied the Order-Up-To Level, S. The plots Figure 2 show the behavior of the on-hand inventory in “richest” alternative with S = 60. In the snippet shown in Figure 2, the on-hand inventory never comes close to stocking out. You can read that too ways. One, a bit naïve, is to say “Good, we’re well protected.” The other, more aggressive, is to say, “Oh no, we’re bloated. I wonder what would happen if we reduced S.”

The Tradeoff Curve Revealed

Figure 3 shows the results of reducing S from 60 down to 30 in steps of 5 units. The table shows that Total Cost is the sum of Holding Cost, Ordering Cost, and Shortage Cost. For the (T,S) policy, the ordering cost is always the same, since an order is placed like clockwork every 30 days. But the other components of cost respond to the changes in S.

Figure 3: The experimental results and corresponding tradeoff curve showing how changing the Order-Up-To Level (“S”) impacts both Service Level and Total Annual Cost

Note that the Service Level is always lower than the Fill Rate in these scenarios. As a professor, I always think of this difference in terms of exam grading. Each replenishment cycle is like a test. Service Level is about the probability of a stockout, so it’s a like the grade on pass/fail exam with one question that must be answered perfectly. If there is no stockout in a cycle, that’s an A. If there is a stockout, that’s an F. It doesn’t matter if it’s one unit that’s not supplied or 50 – it’s still an F. But Fill Rate is like a question that is graded with partial credit. So being short one of ten units gets you 90% Fill Rate for that cycle, not 0%. It’s important to understand the difference between these two important metrics for inventory planning – check out this vlog describing service level vs. fill rate via an interactive exercise in Excel.

The plot in Figure 3 is the real news. It pairs Total Cost and Service Level for various levels of S. If you read the graph right to left, it tells us that there are dramatic cost savings to be had by reducing S with very little penalty in terms of reduced item availability. For instance, reducing S from 60 to 55 saves close to $800 per year on this one item while reducing service level just a bit from (essentially) 100% to a still-impressive 99%. Cutting S some more does the same, though not as dramatically. If you read the graph left to right, you see that moving up from S = 30 to S = 35 costs about $1,000 per year but improves Service Level from an F grade (45%) to at least a C grade (71%). After that, pushing S higher costs progressively more while gaining progressive less.

The tradeoff curve doesn’t give you an answer to how to set the Order-Up-To Level, but it does let you evaluate the costs and benefits of each possible answer. Take a minute and pretend that this is your problem: Where would you want to be along the tradeoff curve?

You may object and say you hate your choices and want to change the game. Is there escape from the curve? Not from the general curve, but you might be able to shape a less painful curve. How?

You may have other cards to play. One avenue is to try to “shape” the demand so that it is less variable. The demand plot in Figure 2 shows a lot of variability. If you could smooth out the demand, the whole tradeoff curve would shift down, making every choice less expensive. A second avenue is to try to reduce the mean and variability of supplier lead times. Achieving either would also shift the curve down to make the choice less painful. Check out our article on how suppliers influence your inventory costs

Summary

The tradeoff curve is always with us. Sometimes we may be able to make it more friendly, but we always to pick our spot along it. It is better to know what you’re getting for any choice of inventory policy than to try to guess, and the curve gives you that.  When you have an accurate estimate of that curve, you are no longer flying blind when it comes to inventory planning. 

1. Built-in ERP functionality is baked into Order Management.

Consider what is meant by “demand management”, “demand planning”, and “forecasting”. These terms imply certain standard functionality for collaboration, statistical analysis, and reporting to support a professional demand planning process.  However, in most ERP systems, “demand management” consists of executing MRP and reconciling demand and supply for the purpose of placing orders, i.e., “order management.” It has very little to do with demand planning which is discrete process focused on developing the best possible predictions of future demand by combining statistical analysis with business knowledge of events, promotions, and sales force intelligence.   Most ERP systems offer little statistical capability and, when offered, the user is left with a choice of a few statistical methods that they either have to apply manually from a drop-down list or program themselves. It’s baked into the order management process enabling the user to possibly how the forecast might impact inventory.  However, there isn’t any ability to manage the forecast, improve the quality of the forecast, apply and track management overrides, collaborate, measure forecast accuracy, and track “forecast value add.” 

2. ERP planning methods are often based on simplistic rules of thumb.

ERP systems will always offer min, max, safety stock, reorder point, reorder quantity, and forecasts to drive replenishment decisions.  But what about the underlying methods used to calculate these important drivers?   In nearly every case, the methods provided are nothing more than rule-of-thumb approaches that don’t account for demand or supplier variability.  Some do offer “service level targeting” but mistakenly rely on the assumption of a Normal distribution (“bell-shaped curve”) which means the required safety stocks and reorder points recommended by the system to achieve the service level target are going to be flat out wrong if your data doesn’t fit the ideal theoretical model, which is often gravely unrealistic.  Such over-simplified calculations tend to do more harm than good.  

3. You’ll probably still use spreadsheets for at least 2 years after purchase.

Most often, if you were to implement a new ERP solution, your old data would be stranded.  So, any native ERP functionality for forecasting, setting stocking policy such as Min/Max, etc., cannot be used, and you will be forced to revert back to cumbersome and error-prone spreadsheets for at least two years (one year to implement at earliest and another year to collect at least 12 months of history).  Hardly a digital transformation.  Using a best-of-breed solution avoids this problem.  You can load data from your legacy ERP system and not disrupt your ERP deployment.  This means that on Day 1 of ERP go-live you can populate your new ERP system with better inputs for demand forecasts, safety stocks, reorder points, and Min/Max settings.

4. ERP isn’t designed to do everything

The “Do everything in ERP/One-Vendor” mindset was a marketing message promoted by ERP firms, particularly SAP, to get you, the customer, to spend 100% of your IT budget with them.  That marketing message has been parroted back to users by analyst groups, IT firms, and systems integrators, drowning out rational voices who asked “Why do you want to be so dependent on one firm to the point of using inferior forecasting and inventory planning technology?”  The sheer number of IT failures and huge implementation costs have caused many companies to rethink their approach to ERP.  With the advent of specialized planning apps born in the cloud with no IT footprint, the way to go is a “thin” ERP focused on the fundamentals – accounting, order management, financials – but supported by specialized planning apps. 

The expertise of ERP consultant’s lies in how their system is designed to automate certain business processes and how the system can be configured or customized.   Their consultants are not specialists in on proper approaches to planning stock, forecasting, and inventory planning.  So if you are trying to understand what demand planning approach is right for your business, how should you buffer properly, (e.g., “Should we do Min/Max or forecast-based replenishment?” “Should we use forecasting method X?”), you generally aren’t going to find it and if you do that resource will be spread quite thin. 

To test software solutions via a series of empirical competition can be a considerable option. For forecasting / demand planning, a traditional “hold out” test in which 2014-2018 data are provided to software vendors and 2019 is held out for later comparison against forecasts provided by competing vendors. The company then measures forecast error and bias. This approach is advocated nearly universally for assessing forecast accuracy. It’s a good way to assess monthly or weekly forecast accuracy, but it is minimally useful if you have a different objective: Optimizing inventory.

In our last blog, we discussed how to pick a targeted service level. We indicated that just because you set a target (or a system recommends a target) doesn’t mean you’ll actually achieve the target. The right way to measure accuracy if you are interested in optimizing stock levels is to focus on the accuracy of the service level projection. This will account for both lead time demand and safety stock.

Setting a target service level is a strategic decision about inventory risk management. Inventory software does the tactical work by computing reorder points (a.k.a. mins) meant to achieve a user-defined target or that will achieve a system-calculated optimal target. But if the software uses the wrong demand model, the achieved service level will miss the target, sometimes significantly. The result of this error will be either shortages or inventory bloat, depending on the direction of the miss.

Forecasting is a means to an end. The end is to optimize inventory levels. Because demand is uncertain, companies that need to provide even moderate service levels must stock more than the forecast, often much more. But doesn’t low forecast error mean lower safety stock? The better my forecasts, the lower my inventory? Yes, true. But what matters when determining the required inventory are both accurate forecasts of the most likely demand and accurate estimates of the variability around the most likely demand.

Especially with long tailed, intermittent demand, traditional forecast accuracy assessments over a conventional 12 month forecast horizon miss the point three ways.

– First, the relevant time scale for inventory optimization is the replenishment lead time, which is usually much shorter than 12 months. Demand during lead times measured in days or weeks has volatility that gets averaged out over long forecast horizons. This is bad because factoring in the effect of volatility is essential to calculation of optimal reorder points.

– Second, forecast accuracy assessed over a multi-month forecast horizon focuses on the typical error in a typical month within the horizon. In contrast, inventory optimization requires a focus on cumulative demand, not period-by-period demand.

– Third, and most important is that forecast error metrics are focused on the middle of the demand distribution, aiming to estimate the most likely demand. But setting reorder points involves estimating high percentiles of the cumulative demand distribution over a lead time. Estimating the middle a bit better but having no clue about, say, the 95th percentile, is not helpful.

Consider this hypothetical example. If Vendor A forecasts 20 units with 110% error and Vendor B forecasts 22 units with 105% error, then Vendor B has an advantage in the forecasting game. But if you want a high service level and the demand is intermittent, you’ll have to stock a lot more than 20 or 22 units. Let’s assume you select Vendor B’s technology to plan stocking levels. You then notice that when planning reorder points to achieve a 95% service level, you often fall short – way more often that the expected 5% of the time. You come to realize that Vendor B’s approach completely underestimates the safety stock required to achieve the target service target. Focusing on vendors’ forecast error isn’t going to help. You will come to wish that you had verified Vendor A and B’s service level accuracy. Now you are stuck arbitrarily adjusting Vendor B’s service level targets to compensate for the shortfall.

So what’s needed in vendor competitions is assessment of their systems’ abilities to accurately forecast the inventory required to meet a given service level over an item’s replenishment lead time. Narrowly focusing on measuring forecast error is not appropriate if the mission is managing inventory. This is especially true for long tail items with intermittent demand or items that have medium to high volume but don’t have a demand distribution that looks like the classic “bell shaped curve” (Normal distribution).

The remainder of this blog explains how to test the accuracy of software’s service level calculations, so you can monitor the risk of missing your service level targets. We recommend this accuracy test over traditional “forecast versus actuals” tests because it provides much more insight into how reorder point recommendations will influence inventory levels and customer service.

Office staff are analyzing The Right Forecast Accuracy Metric for Inventory Planning

Service Level Defined

Consider a single inventory item. When inventory drops to or below the reorder point, a replenishment order is generated. This starts a period of risk that lasts as long as the replenishment lead time. During the period of risk, there might be enough incoming demands to create backorders or lost sales. The service level is the probability that there are no backorders or stockouts during the replenishment lead time. Critical items might be given very high target service levels, say 99%, whereas other items might have more relaxed targets, such as 75%. Whatever the target service level, it is best to hit that target.

Calculating Service Level

The service level for an individual item can only be estimated by repeated comparison of observed lead time demand against the calculated reorder point. These estimates take a lot of time: at least dozens of lead times. But fleet-wise service level can be estimated using data compiled over a single lead time.

Let’s do an example. Suppose you have demand histories for 1,000 items over 365 days and that (for simplicity) all items have 45-day lead times. For each item, follow these steps to estimate the fleet-wise achieved service level:

Step 1: Step aside (“hold out”) the most recent 45 days of demand (or however many days is closest to your typical lead times). Compute their sum, which is the most recent value of the actual lead time demand. This is the ground truth to be used to estimate the achieved service level.

Step 2: Use the prior 320 days of demand history to forecast the required inventory to hit a range of service level targets, say 90%, 95%, 97%, and 99%.

Step 3: Check whether the observed lead time demand is less than or equal to the reorder point. If it is, count this as a win; otherwise, count it as a loss. For instance, if the reorder point is 15 units but the most recent lead time demand is 10 units, then this is a win, since the reorder point is high enough to cover a lead time demand of 10 without any shortage. However, if the most recent lead time demand is 18 units, there would be a stockout, and 3 units would either be backordered or counted as lost sales.

Step 4: Working across all items, and all service level targets, tally the percentage of tests for each service level target that resulted in a win. This is the achieved service level. If the target was 90% and 853 of the 1,000 units record a win, then the achieved service level is 85.3%.

Example

Consider a real-world example. The data are daily demand histories of 590 medical supply items used in an internationally famous clinic. For simplicity, we assume each item has a lead time of 45 days. We evaluate target service levels of 70%, 90%, 95% and 99%.
We compare two demand models. The “Normal” model assumes that daily demand has a Normal (“bell-shaped”) distribution. This is the classic assumption used in most introductory textbooks on inventory control and in many software products. Classic though it may be, it is often an inappropriate model of demand for spare parts or supplies. The “Probability Forecast” model takes explicit account of the intermittent nature of demand.

Exhibit 1 shows the results. Column J shows the actual demand over the final 45 observations. The computed reorder points for the Advanced Model are shown in columns L-O.  The computed reorder points for the Normal model are not displayed.  Columns Q-T and V-Y hold the results of the tests for whether the reorder points were high enough to handle the lead time demands in column J.

The final results (yellow cells) show a clear difference between the Normal and Probability (Advanced) demand models. Both did a good job of hitting the 70% service level target, but estimating higher service levels is a more delicate calculation, and the Probability model does a much better job. For instance, the Normal model’s supposed 99% service level turned out to be only 94.4%, while the Probability model hit the target with a 98.5% achieved service level.

Implications

Utilizing the more accurate method achieved the targeted service level, while the less accurate method did not. If the less accurate method is used then real and costly business decisions will be made on the false assumption that a higher service level will be achieved. For example, if a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is based on these results and a 99% service level is committed to, the supplier would actually be five times more likely to stock out than planned (service level promised = 99% or 1% stockout risk vs. service level achieved = 94.5% or 5.5% stock out risk)! This means financial penalties will be incurred five times more often than expected.

Suppose that planners knew the target service level would not be met but were stuck using an inaccurate model. They would still need a way to increase inventory and achieve the desired level of service. What might they choose to do? We have observed situations where the planner enters a higher service level target than needed in order to “trick” the system into delivering the required service level. In the above example, the Normal model needed to have a 99.99% service level entered before it could achieve a target service level of 99%. This change resulted in achieving a 99% service but more than doubled the inventory investment when compared to the Advanced model.

Implementing a Service Level Accuracy Test

At Smart Software, we’ve encouraged many of our customers to conduct the test of service level accuracy as a way for them to assess our and other vendors’ claims during the software selection process. Missing the service level target has extremely costly implications resulting in substantial over stocks or under stocks.  So, test service level accuracy before deploying a solution to identify situations when the modeling fails. Don’t assume that you will achieve the service level you decide to target (or that the system recommends). To request an Excel spreadsheet that serves as a template for a service level accuracy test, email your contact information to info@smartcorp.com and enter “Accuracy Template” in the subject line.