It’s 9 PM: Where is your Inventory?

For the past several decades companies have built supply chains that attempt to optimize cost and results. The supply chains are often months long as international sourcing became the default management strategy. This extra time between supply and demand introduces a great deal of volatility into the supply chain.

To optimize this volatile supply chain, pre-defined product flows from your vendors vendor to your customer or customers customer are established. Yet, this prevailing management strategy not only ignores volatility, which begs for alternative paths, but it has turned a blind eye to its most valuable asset, inventory.

Inventory spends more than 80% of its life outside of your plant or distribution center. If you include the life of your inventory at your customer, it is rarely in your control. Gaining control over your inventory from its first to last day allows alternate, dynamic paths to emerge and be exploited, strict compliance regulations to be exceeded and environmental & social governance to be possible.

It all starts with creating, printing, and applying a unique serial number to each box (eaches, carton, pallet, etc.) being shipped. From day one when your inventory leaves your vendors production line until the day you provide it to a specific customer, you are in control. Know where your inventory is, where it has been, where it is needed and have the ability to divert product flow to bypass segments of your supply chain and their related costs and time.