Inventory Levels
If you stay ready you don’t have to get ready
It is important that we continuously monitor our inventory levels in each department.
This means determining if we are either overstocked or understocked. Conducting a simple walk through prior to opening is usually sufficient. It is painfully obvious when an item is understocked, ideally, we would like to get to a point to where we can communicate with production before we reach that point. For example; after conducting a morning walk through, we notice that the women’s shoe section can be organized and consolidated, after consolidation we determine we can use 15 more pairs of shoes to fill out the rack.
We then communicate this to production who prices and tags 15 pairs of women’s shoes to fill the empty space. If we approach managing inventory levels from this angle, we can ensure we never get to the point where we will have empty and unused shelf space. Equally as important is making sure we are not overstocked on a certain item. For instance, we conduct a morning walk through and we see that we are over stocked on furniture and we know that we have 4 donation pick-ups that day.
This lets us know we need to be more motivated to push furniture by means of working with customers on pricing and to communicate with the drivers on where to store furniture if floor space is not available. If we were to be over stocked with glassware, we would communicate to production to be very selective on the items they are sorting and pricing or this would trigger a rag out process to make space for new inventory.