As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, companies across the globe are rethinking their approaches to inventory management. When supply chains are less certain, dynamic planning and accuracy become very important. Aman explains this in the interview.
“The first thing many companies have started doing is that instead of looking at history on a monthly basis, they’ve pivoted their inventory planning based more on weekly sell cycles to try to understand where the trends are going, especially for items that are seeing a demand surge with Covid,” says Aman Sapra, director of global supply chain and inventory strategy with consulting firm St. Onge. “This shorter-term focus gets into what is known as demand sensing, so in effect, folks are looking to ‘sense’ demand more so than just use history.”
The common denominator to success is putting more weight on the freshest demand data, rather than trying to plan based on what sold at the same time a year before or in preceding months. Most inventory planning solutions, adds Sapra, have logic and rules engines that would allow a company to put more emphasis on current demand signals, and less on history that predates the pandemic.
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