How to Solve the Reorder Point Formula Inventory Management Strategy

It also allows you to notice sudden shifts in demand and react accordingly to avoid causing the bullwhip effect in your supply chain. Reorder point is not a stable number, but is flexible based on sales trends and the demand cycle of a given product. This means you need to have an understanding of each product’s inventory levels and sales to optimize its reorder point. This is easily done using inventory management software that tracks everything you need to know about your inventory. Additionally, let’s say that we typically use about 10 of these items per day in our production line, but we also have days where we’ve used as many as 14 in a day. Putting these 4 values into the Safety Stock formula, we get a value of 210 for our safety stock level. I’ll start with the scenario where we run inventory levels down to zero before new inventory arrives from our supplier.

It also saves you money long-term by trimming inventory with lower sales. Incorrectly managing your inventory how to calculate reorder point comes at a steep price, and the likelihood of this happening increases as your portfolio grows.

Don’t rely solely on the reorder point formula

Delay in the deliveries and not matching the ETA because of limited stock can impact your relationship with the customers and increase the chances of losing future business transactions. SoStocked also has a feature that allows you toset your min and max values in units or days. However, we recommend putting them “in Days” as your number of units may fluctuate depending on demand or season. Now https://www.bookstime.com/ that you know the factors influencing ROPs, let’s go back to the reorder point formula. In this section, I will break down the reorder point formula and tell you how to calculate it correctly. Or, for suppliers, the right time to create a Manufacturing Order to make more products. Either situation would lead to lost sales and additional holding costs or overspend on express shipping costs.

This doesn’t have to be done by hand — a good cloud manufacturing software can do it for you to cut back on some admin time. You should reorder when you have 40 boxes of stock left in your inventory, which is four days of stock. Given that your lead time is also four days, the new stock should arrive just in time for you to continue selling without interruption. Ecommerce businesses can use a simple formula to calculate reorder points for each product. Calculating reorder points goes hand in hand with having a clear idea of purchasing trends over a given time period. The more you calculate ROP for each product, the more accurately you can forecast demand in the future and ensure you use the reorder quantity formula correctly. With an accurate reorder point for each SKU, you’ll always have enough stock on hand to satisfy customer demand — without tying up excess capital in inventory.

Reorder Point Explained

These times tend to vary quite a bit as different industries see increases and decreases in demand. For more information on studying supplier delivery times, watch Episode 3 in this video series called How to Calculate Supplier Delivery Performance. Calculating the reorder point for a given product first requires that you determine a product’s average daily sales, lead time, and amount of safety stock.

Reorder points are a valuable tool for making sure you have sufficient inventory on hand for your customers without having so much inventory that it becomes costly and unmanageable. Investments in setting up smart reorder points today can yield dividends in efficiency for years to come. Average delivery lead time is the average amount of time it takes for a shipment to arrive from the time the order was placed. Average delivery lead time changes with fluctuations in seasonal demand, the quantity ordered, and distance from the up-chain supplier. For a reasonable measure, take an average of the past three months of POs for the SKU item you want to set a reorder point for. Reorder point is a supply chain management technique that businesses can use to guide this delicate balancing act to improve inventory operations, avoid stockouts, and maintain ideal inventory levels.