Find slow movers and set reorder points from sales history

Use 12 months of sales to flag dead stock and suggest reorder points for your fast movers.

The problem

Most distributors carry thousands of SKUs and set reorder points once, years ago. Cash gets tied up in items that haven't sold in a year while popular items run out.

Step by step

1. 1Export 12 months of sales by SKU and month, plus on-hand, cost and vendor lead time, from your ERP. Remove customer names; you only need item-level data.
2. 2Open it in Excel with Copilot, or upload it to ChatGPT or Claude for data analysis.
3. 3Ask for an ABC ranking by sales dollars, a list of items with no sales in 6+ months and their cost on hand, and suggested reorder points from average usage and lead time.
4. 4Have purchasing review the suggestions; they know about seasonal items, contract stock and special orders.
5. 5Update reorder points in your ERP for the items you agree with, and plan returns or markdowns for dead stock. Re-run quarterly.

Copy-paste prompt

Here is 12 months of item-level sales data with columns: SKU, description, vendor, monthly units (12 columns), on hand, unit cost, vendor lead time in days. [attach]. (1) Rank SKUs A/B/C by annual sales dollars (A = top 80%). (2) List SKUs with zero sales in the last 6 months and total cost on hand. (3) For A and B items, suggest a reorder point = average daily usage x lead time + safety stock of [x] days, and compare with on hand. Show results in tables and explain any assumptions. Do not invent data for missing cells.

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