Taking Stock
The "predicament" with inventory that Mark was talking about turns out to be an operational challenge.
"Let me show you an e-mail about last week’s problem", Mark says.
All,
this week we were confronted with an unfortunate turn of events which almost lead to the loss of a large order. On Tuesday, we missed a service level target with two customers who needed a set of tyres [SKU: 3342-813562]. At the time, nobody noticed until one of the customers contacted us directly and asked where the replacement part was.
Then on Wednesday, I had to inform a rental corp that we couldn’t fulfill their confirmed bulk order (20 pcs) due to the same tyres not being available. They promptly indicated they wanted to cancel, which we managed to smooth over (phew!).
This kind of mistakes due to inaccurate stock levels is unacceptable. Please make sure this doesn’t happen again.
We can’t be selling or servicing bikes we don’t have tyres for. Frankly, it’s embarrassing.
Bram
Sales Manager, Bolt Bike
Sales Manager
Mark explains that when determining stock levels, Bolt has been relying on inventory levels as reported from the warehouse. However, this doesn’t take into account that some inventory items may have been reserved for sales made or that they are needed for service requests. That’s why Mark thinks it’s hard to serve all the different customers at once. "I don’t think this has anything to do with your assignment", Mark says. "It’s more about, you know, how do we make sure we have the right data?"
You propose to consider the question of "how much do we have on stock?" as a decision rather than a data management issue. After all, the data itself is all there already.