Picture this. You’re on the Executive Dashboard screen looking at your Summary tab, and you take note of your Stock holding figure. The value of $8.6m sounds fair enough, but you want more details!
That’s when you notice the Investment graph. Surely this should give you more details about your stock holding. You realize that hovering over each of the bars on the graph gives you a stock value per category.
This is what you find:
Minimum stock: $1.3k
Safety stock: $1.9m
Cycle stock: $1.6m
Eff cycle: $310.3k
Excess: $2.9m
When you add that together, you get a value of $6.8m.
Wait a second! What’s going on here? There’s a gap of $1.8m between the total stock holding value and total investment value! Yikes.
Why does total investment not equal total stock holding?
We can help answer this question for you.
Remember our article Executive Dashboard Summary? That article points out that the Investment graph does not, in fact, include all your items, but rather displays the sum of the stock being held in each “constraint category”. A quick recap on what’s being shown:
Minimum stock - Stock being held because of minimum stock levels.
Safety stock - Additional layer of stock to minimize risk of items stocking out.
Cycle stock - Based on the specified replenishment cycle.
Effective replenishment cycle - The replenishment cycle will be adjusted to incorporate minimum order quantities (MOQ). This value indicates how much additional stock is required to accommodate these supplier constraints.
Excess - The sum of stock over and above the order-up-to-level (LT+SS+RC).
What we don’t see on this graph are items with the “New” status, and items with excess stock that also have surplus orders. For example, see the image below.
An item is considered to have excess stock when the available stock is above the order-up-to level. Therefore, the item in the image below has excess stock. However, it does not fall under the excess stock category because it has taken on the surplus orders status. In the case where an item fits into both the excess stock and surplus orders categories, the item will take on the more critical status, which is surplus orders. The reason for this is that if surplus orders are not attended to, the stock will likely end up as excess stock eventually. It’s best to work on those surplus orders before that happens.
In short, the investment graph does not fully cover the categories your stock holding falls under. It instead brings focus to specific categories that may impact your inventory management and investment decisions. For a comprehensive breakdown of your stock on hand, head over to your Dashboard and select “full report” on the Stock holding panel.
Happy investigating!