How Fishbowl Automates Inventory Order Management

How Fishbowl automates inventory order management for reorder point and purchase order calculation in QuickBooks. While Fishbowl does look at sales history for a specified date range as well as the ability to forecast a percentage of increase, it does not account for variability in demand or customer service levels. By looking at variability in demand, one can automatically pickup any trend in real demand not an estimate.

Furthermore, the lead-time, safety stock, and basic stock are all manual settings.  Actual lead-times frequently differ from target. It is much better to use real data and business intelligence. Safety stock and basic stock should be based on business intelligence gained from your accounting data so that one can maintain customer service levels The goal is to not have too much inventory but also not too little inventory.  

Finally, the order quantity is determined by a order up to level based on days between orders.   While this does make it easy, it is not based on any business intelligence that maintains inventory levels at peak financial performance. It is also not based on maintaining any level of customer service.

Sometimes easier is not better, when automating based on limited information one can easily drive themselves in the wrong direction. It is much better to use business intelligence to drive inventory levels to peak financial performance so that you can be among the top 20% performing businesses who have nine time less inventory than their bottom 30% performing peers while being seven times less likely to be in a stock-out. Real business intelligence can prove that sometimes less is more.

 

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