What if your company’s surge in sales is tied to TikTok posts or a seasonal event? If you’re just looking at sales velocity without context, you might double production when demand was actually a spike. The numbers are there, but the trend gets lost.
Between Excel dashboards, Power BI reports, and scattered analytics tools, there’s no shortage of numbers. But here’s the question: Are you actually seeing the story they tell?
Most companies start by saying, “We already track inventory. We have reports.” And that may be true. You probably know your current stock levels. You may even forecast demand. But are you connecting the dots?
That’s the difference between reporting and understanding. Data, when viewed in isolation, only tells you what happened, not why it happened or what to do next.
Smarter Inventory Forecasting Starts Here
We hear it all the time: “We already use Power BI,” or “We have Excel reports for that.” The objection isn’t wrong, but it misses the bigger picture. It’s not about which tool you use. It’s about how you bring all your data together in one place and turn it into something you can act on.
If you don’t integrate your Amazon stock, in-house shelves, and 3PL inventory into one source of truth, you’re reacting instead of managing. If you don’t align your forecast with current open orders and production lead time, you’re risking a stockout. If you don’t tie reorder points to customer behaviour, you’re likely overstocking the wrong SKUs and understocking the right ones.
This is especially true for companies managing multiple fulfillment models like FBA, FCA, and hybrid warehousing. Pulling together the right data, making sense of it, and turning it into clear action can be overwhelming and time-consuming – by the time you’ve wrangled all the data, the moment to act might already be gone!
The goal is to enhance the way you use them, to connect outputs from various systems and understand how they influence each other.
Let’s break down the KPIs we often look at in isolation:
- Sales Velocity (Average Monthly Usage): Cleaned, de-seasonalized, and contextualized by customer behavior, not just past totals.
- Months of Supply (MOS): A live view of how long your current stock will last.
- Forecasted Demand: Built from trends that actually matter, what’s happening now, what’s changed, and what’s next.
- Reorder Point (RP): Not a fixed number. A flexible, smart threshold tuned to demand variability and lead times.
- Safety Stock: Customized per item and per customer segment. Not one-size-fits-all.
- Lead Time + Quantity on Order: Aligned, current, and integrated into decision-making.
- Economic Order Quantity (EOQ): Calculated to balance carrying costs with reorder efficiency.
- Available to Promise (ATP): What you can actually commit, based on real-time availability and upcoming demand
These metrics are more than just numbers. They become actionable insights that tell you when to replenish, how much to produce, and what stock is at risk. Together, they create a multidimensional view of your business operations.
What Happens When You Connect the Dots
An integrated, end-to-end view of your sales and inventory data truly connects the dots—letting you spot demand shifts before they spark stock-outs, pinpoint which SKUs drive your margins (and tie up capital), and intelligently move inventory where it’s needed most.
The result? Fewer costly emergency shipments, less rework, and a smoother, more predictable supply chain.
Our forecasting engine doesn’t rely only on past data. It puts sales velocity, demand seasonality, product recency, and stock status into context to build forward-looking models that reflect your business. The result? More accurate stock decisions and fewer surprises.
For instance, imagine a product that normally moves 50 units a month and you’ve got 100 on hand—it sounds safe, until you factor in an open order for 60 units and a three-week production lead time, which quickly slashes your true Months of Supply.
Our tool not only does those calculations for you, it also lets you:
- Set alert thresholds for safety stock
- Adjust forecasts for seasonality or promotional spikes
- View recommendations based on product frequency and monetary value
So you can make decisions with confidence
So What Can You Do Differently?
Next time you look at your numbers, try looking at the connections:
- If your MOS is healthy but your ATP is low, why? Is something stuck in transit?
- Are spikes in demand aligned with marketing activity or sudden price changes?
- Does your EOQ still make sense now that lead times have doubled or warehousing costs have risen?
- Are certain SKUs underperforming not because of demand, but because of fulfilment issues?
When you shift your focus from “What happened?” to “What does this mean together?”, you move from reactive to proactive.
This Isn’t About Falling Behind. It’s About Getting Ahead.
No one’s saying your current systems are broken. But are they working together? Are they giving you visibility, or just more charts, numbers, rows, columns…? Or it dragged you in endless data manipulation so you just gave up?
Inventory KPIs are not meant to be siloed. When brought together, they form a living, breathing pulse of your business, one that helps you make confident, strategic decisions.
You don’t have to change everything overnight. But maybe it’s time to rethink how you use the data you already have.
Let’s talk about what that could look like for your operations. Where are you seeing gaps? What metrics do you trust most, and which ones are always up for debate?
