From the course: Careers in Supply Chain and Operations
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Inventory forecasting and management
From the course: Careers in Supply Chain and Operations
Inventory forecasting and management
- One of the toughest parts of any supply chain is managing inventory. Companies generally need to have some inventory so that they can move fast, either to build a product or to sell something to a customer. But inventory is expensive. It ties up your money, it takes up space, and it tends to lose its value over time. So it's a balance. And while there are some good reasons to have some inventory, the goal is usually to keep your inventory levels as low as possible. Figuring out how much to order and when to order it involves a lot of math. In particular, it requires you to use probabilities and statistics to analyze historical data and make predictions about what's going to happen in the future. The folks who do this work generally have titles like demand planner, inventory planner, or materials manager. They run analyses to figure out how much inventory they need and when to order it. And a lot of this work is done in spreadsheets like Excel. But they also tend to work with…
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