Supply chain excellence requires striking the most profitable balance among service levels, lead times, budgets, risks, and inventory costs. These metrics are largely determined by how a company's supply, production, and distribution network is configured and managed, where it positions its inventory, and what inventory stocking strategies have been implemented.

Inventory optimization is the discipline of continuously managing inventory policies to optimize supply chain performance against business objectives, changing market conditions, risks, and supply chain constraints. These policies include what inventories to carry, where, in what form, and how much across the procurement, manufacturing, and distribution network.

DemandCaster Inventory Optimization can enable an organization to fundamentally improve service levels, minimize inventory costs, and reduce lead times.

All inventories are not bad. In fact, inventory is the lifeblood of the supply chain. DemandCaster Inventory Optimization enables peak efficiency by helping companies ensure that desirable levels of inventories are maintained where needed, while excess inventory is eliminated. Just as all inventories are not bad, not all products are created equal.

DemandCaster Inventory Optimization helps companies differentiate between their key products and the rest of the product line as well as adopt inventory policies that will maximize the volume and profitability of those key products during their life cycle.

DemandCaster drives inventory performance by implementing five best practices of inventory optimization:

1. Monitoring customer buying behavior,
2. "ABC" segmentation
3. Postponement
4. Optimized inventory policies
5. Continuous learning and process improvement.

DemandCaster Inventory Optimization can enable an organization to improve service levels and reduce inventory costs and lead times by integrating with ERP and supply chain systems to institutionalize these five best practices.

Key capabilities of DemandCaster Inventory Optimization can include:

• Tracking and analysis of transaction, customer buying patterns, and inventory performance
• Multi-dimensional ABC segmentation by demand patterns and volumes, service criticality, product structure and life cycles, lead times, competitive positioning, or custom attributes
• Best inventory policy determination for each SKU at each location it will be stocked
• Multi-stage inventory and postponement optimization
• Capacity planning
• Easy composition and analysis of "what-if" scenarios
• Actual performance monitoring for continuous learning and process improvement
• Rich and easily extensible library of packaged metrics, KPIs, and reports

Benefits of DemandCaster Inventory Optimization can include:

• Reduced inventory levels, expediting, and overall logistics costs
• Increased service-level performance and customer satisfaction
• Improved asset utilization and inventory turns
• Improved inventory performance
• Improved product availability while reducing carrying costs, risks, and cash-to-cash cycles