Dynamic Inventory
Summary
Inventory Intelligence ensures you have the right products, in the right place, at the right time.
For every product in every location, Peak generates an optimal safety stock volume, minimum stock level, maximum stock level and dynamic stock status. This ensures that you always hold the optimal volumes of stock in every possible location.
Minimize excess inventory, optimize safety stock levels, reduce shipping costs and maintain your desired service levels with Peak.
For use by demand planners, supply planners, merchandisers and any other professional who is responsible for ensuring optimal stock levels.
What does this application do?
Inventory Intelligence ensures you have the right products, in the right place, at the right time.
Inventory Intelligence applies AI models to inventory, sales and product data from across your business. Using intelligent demand forecasting and safety stock models, it augments your data with AI-powered predictions to ensure that the stock across your network is optimal at the most granular level. For every product in every location, Peak generates an optimal safety stock, minimum stock level, maximum stock level and dynamic stock status. With the added modules of Replenishment and Reorder, these values are used to generate recommended replenishment quantities and reorder quantities to ensure that stock always remains within the optimal boundaries.
Add and remove modules to tailor to your needs.
Inventory Intelligence has numerous additional modules which can be added to increase your capabilities. These include:
Reorder: Generates recommended purchase orders to meet demand.
Reorder uses SKU-level demand forecasting, inventory optimization models and reorder point formulas to calculate demand and optimal safety stock levels, to give you recommendations of when and how much of any SKU you should reorder.
Replenishment: Recommends optimal push replenishment volumes to meet demand.
Replenishment uses forecasting and stock optimization models to recommend dynamic safety stock levels and replenishment points for every store. This ensures that you have the right stock cover in every location.
Configure Inventory your way
Your business is unique — so your AI should be unique, too. Inventory Intelligence can easily be configured to incorporate your processes. This means that all outcomes are finely tuned to your business.
Rapid to deploy, easy to integrate
Peak will seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, and was built to provide value in weeks, not years. You don’t need to rip and replace your current tech stack, and we have a collection of robust connectors to commonly used systems which can be used to get you started.
What challenges does this product solve?
Optimising stock levels is critical for any business which holds physical products.
Balancing stock levels and service levels is tough. Holding too much inventory will ensure you don’t miss sales, but will cause overstocking and mean that capital is tied up in stock that doesn’t move. However, holding too little inventory can risk missed sales.
There are too many intricate factors for humans to make optimal decisions at the most granular levels without data to support them. Some products are easy to forecast and show consistently smooth demand, but others show highly variable demand. Some products take longer than others to arrive, and some suppliers are more reliable than others with delivery times. All of these factors also vary by location, making it impossible to optimise inventory at the most granular level without using intelligent software.
Implementing Inventory Intelligence has significant benefits. Businesses see, on average, 2% improvement in availability and 20% reduction in stock, in addition to improved forecast accuracy, better service-levels and increased cost-effectiveness. It empowers businesses to stay agile in a rapidly changing market, ensuring they can meet customer demands promptly and minimize the risk of overstock or stockouts.
Definitions
- Safety Stock: A “buffer” of extra stock that is maintained to mitigate risk of stockouts caused by uncertainties in supply and demand
- Minimum Stock Level: The minimum amount of stock that should be held for a given product at any given time.
- Maximum Stock Level: The maximum amount of stock that should be held for a given product at any given time.
- Stock Status: A dynamic tag given to each product in each location which describes how well stocked that product is
- Understocked: The stock level is below the minimum stock level, therefore more of this product is needed.
- On Target: The stock level is within the minimum and maximum recommended levels, therefore we have a healthy stock level for this product.
- Overstocked: The stock level is above the maximum recommended stock level.
Getting started
- When you log in to Peak, you’ll be presented with a ‘Welcome’ screen.
- In the left-hand navigation bar, select 'Inventory' from the 'Inventory AI' dropdown.
Overview
After opening Inventory, you’ll be presented with the Overview page shown below. This page gives you a high level overview of your entire network, with the ability to filter down to different products, locations and categories.
On this overview page, you can perform the following actions:
- View current high level metrics and how these have changed, including the number of understocked SKUs, the number of overstocked SKUs, the value of these SKUs and current service levels.
- View how stock holding has changed over time, in both value and units.
- View your target vs actual service levels over time.
- Filter by location and/or category, which will refresh the figures and graphs noted above.
- Find a product by ID or name, which will refresh the figures and graphs noted above.
Inventory
After reviewing this Overview tab, you can dive deeper into products at a more granular level by selecting the Inventory tab.
This page shows you an overview of every product and location combination across the network, with each row in the table showing a unique product in a unique location. At this granularity, you can see some of the key AI-generated values which have been attached by Peak’s intelligence models:
- Minimum stock value
- Maximum stock value
- Stock status
On this page you can:
- Understand the stock profile across the network at the most granular level
- Sort by an attribute of your choice, by clicking on the column heading you want to sort by
- To sort by most overstocked or understocked click on the Stock Status column heading. The table will now be ordered by ‘stock difference to target levels x price’
- Filter by location and/or category and/or stock status, which will refresh the table shown above.
- Download the table as a CSV by either:
- Selecting rows you want to download using the checkbox on the far left of the table, then selecting the blue “Download” button
- Selecting “Download All” to download every row of the table shown
- Note: if you have applied filters to the table, only the filtered rows will be downloaded.
- Dig deeper to understand product information at an even more detailed level, to help understand why the noted values have been generated, by selecting the “View” button at the far right side of the table, on the row you want to investigate (as shown below)
Upon navigating to the product detail page, you can:
- View the safety stock value calculated for this product and location combination
- View the constraints associated including order frequency and lead time
- Use these values to better understand why the recommended stock levels and status have been given
- View how stock holding has changed over time in units, and adjust the graph period to suit your needs.
- View your target vs actual service levels over time, and how this compares by units and value.
Service Levels
To understand more about your Service Levels, you can then navigate to the tab shown below. This tab is called Service Levels.
This page shows you how service levels across the network have changed over time, with the ability to search for specific products or filter by locations and/or categories. The graph can be shown in value or units, and more information can be found by hovering over each point on the graph.
On this page, you can:
- View your target vs actual service levels at this point in time by both value and units
- Filter by location and/or category, which will refresh the graph shown above.
- Find a product by ID or name, which will refresh the graph shown above.
- Hover over a data point on the graph to understand the cost of inventory and the units of inventory that are being held to achieve your current service level, and how this compares to other service levels.
Reorder
If you have purchased the Reorder module, you can review your recommended Reorders by selecting the Reorder tab.
This page shows you an overview of every product and location combination across the network which has the potential to be re-ordered, with each row in the table showing a unique product in a unique location. In addition to the table on the Inventory tab, this table contains a recommended reorder value for items that require reordering, as well as the cost of this reorder and any necessary constraints (e.g. minimum order quantity)
On this page you can:
- Understand the stock profile across the network at the most granular level
- Sort by an attribute of your choice, by clicking on the column heading you want to sort by
- Filter by location and/or category and/or stock status, which will refresh the table shown above.
- Apply a filter to only show products that need to be reordered at this moment
- Download the table as a CSV by either:
- Selecting rows you want to download using the checkbox on the far left of the table, then selecting the blue “Download” button
- Selecting “Download All” to download every row of the table shown
- Note: if you have applied filters to the table, only the filtered rows will be downloaded.
- Dig deeper to understand product information at an even more detailed level, to help understand why the noted values have been generated, by selecting the “View” button at the far right side of the table, on the row you want to investigate (as shown below)
Upon navigating to the product detail page, you can:
- View the recommended reorder for this product and location combination
- View the safety stock value calculated for this product and location combination
- View the constraints associated including order frequency, lead time, minimum order quantity and pack size
- Use these values to better understand why the recommended reorder volume has been given
- View how stock holding has changed over time in units, and adjust the graph period to suit your needs.
- View your target vs actual service levels over time, and how this compares by units and value.
Replenishment
If you have purchased the Replenishment module, you can review your recommended Replenishments by selecting the Replenishment tab.
This page shows you an overview of every product and location combination across the network which has the potential to be replenished, with each row in the table showing a unique product in a unique location. In addition to the table on the Inventory tab, this table contains a recommended replenishment value for items that require ordering, as well as the cost of this order and other useful information such as DC stock levels.
On this page you can:
- Understand the stock profile across the network at the most granular level
- Sort by an attribute of your choice, by clicking on the column heading you want to sort by
- Filter by location and/or category and/or stock status, which will refresh the table shown above.
- Apply a filter to only show products that need to be replenished at this moment
- Download the table as a CSV by either:
- Selecting rows you want to download using the checkbox on the far left of the table, then selecting the blue “Download” button
- Selecting “Download All” to download every row of the table shown
- Note: if you have applied filters to the table, only the filtered rows will be downloaded.
- Dig deeper to understand product information at an even more detailed level, to help understand why the noted values have been generated, by selecting the “View” button at the far right side of the table, on the row you want to investigate (as shown below)
Upon navigating to the product detail page, you can:
- View the recommended replenishment order for this product and location combination
- View the safety stock value calculated for this product and location combination
- View the constraints associated including order frequency, lead time and pack size
- Use these values to better understand why the recommended replenishment order has been given
- View how stock holding has changed over time in units, and adjust the graph period to suit your needs.
- View your target vs actual service levels over time, and how this compares by units and value.
