From Chinese New Year to the festive period and summer vacation season, there are certain times in the calendar when your factories and warehouses may close down or slow down, and it’s important you’re prepared.
Inventory Planner makes it simple to ensure you have enough stock to meet demand, even if your suppliers are unavailable, by tweaking your days of stock setting.
Follow these steps to account for supplier unavailability:
Step 1: Export your current settings
Before you make any changes, we strongly recommend that you export your current days of stock information from the Replenishment screen, so that you can reimport your current settings once the vacation or holiday season is over.
Tip: Make sure you've enabled your SKU and days of stock columns.
If you have more than one variant with the same SKU, then you'll need to enable the ID column before you export.
Step 2: Update your days of stock
The easiest and quickest to update your days of stock is using the Bulk Actions tool. In Replenishment, select your products, then click Bulk Actions > Set lead time and days of stock.
Then, add in the relevant number of days of stock to cover the period of downtime. For example, if the factory is going to be closed for a week, add 7 days to the days of stock.
Doing so means Inventory Planner will calculate the stock that needs to be ordered to cover that period too.
Note: Lead time settings should stay as they are normally set in your account.
Step 3: Place your order
The next step is to place an order for the suggested quantities and items. Go to your replenishment report, select the items you want to reorder and hit the New purchase order button. Learn more about creating purchase orders here.
Step 4: Reimport your ‘old’ days of stock data
In step one, we advised you download your days of stock data. Once you have placed the purchase orders covering the period of downtime, you can upload the spreadsheet you exported in the first step.
Reimport the spreadsheet by going to Replenishment > Import > Variant settings.
Upload the spreadsheet with one column for the SKU (or another unique identifier such as ID, if you have duplicated SKUs) plus a separate column for days of stock. Learn more about importing variant attributes here.
That’s it! You’ve successfully ordered enough stock to cover seasonal downtime.