Balancing supply and demand in an inventory-based business is challenging, especially in today’s fast-paced and unpredictable supply chain. However continuously keeping the right amount of stock on hand is crucial for customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and profitability. Unfortunately, poor supply planning can lead to costly stockouts, excess inventory, and operational inefficiencies. That’s where StockIQ comes into play. StockIQ is a powerful supply planning solution that allows you to streamline inventory management, improve forecasting accuracy, monitor supplier performance, and optimize replenishment strategies.
Whether you’re looking for a new inventory management solution or you’re already using StockIQ and you’re eager to maximize your approach, this step-by-step guide has you covered. Here’s everything you need to know about mastering your supply chain with StockIQ.
Understanding Supply Planning Basics
Before diving into the specifics of StockIQ, it’s important to touch on the fundamentals of supply planning and its role in a company’s inventory and operations.
Supply planning is a strategic end-to-end process of managing a business’s inventory, to ensure that the right products are available to meet customer demand. It involves understanding demand forecasting, inventory levels, supplier performance, procurement, and consumer habits, to create an efficient and cost-effective replenishment strategy.
There are several key challenges in supply planning, which StockIQ can help you manage:
- Stockoust: Running out of inventory, leading to lost sales and dissatisfied customers.
- Excess inventory: Holding too much stock, which ties up capital and leads to high carrying costs. Studies show that inventory distortions from stockouts and excess inventory cost more than $1.7 trillion annually.
- Demand volatility: Fluctuating customer demand makes accurate planning difficult. While this has long been the case, it’s even more challenging in the modern e-commerce era, where consumer habits fluctuate rapidly.
- Supplier variability: While there are many benefits to the global supply chain, there are also many vulnerabilities to it. For example, one survey found that 90% of respondents encountered supply chain disruptions in 2024, while further data shows a surge in shipping delays. This can impact lead times, which then impacts supply planning.
- Manual processes: Many supply chain businesses still rely on manual processes in at least part of their business (for example, manual spreadsheets). These processes can be inefficient, time-consuming, and error-prone.
How exactly does StockIQ solve these supply planning challenges? StockIQ is designed to automate and optimize supply planning, by monitoring your operations in real-time and giving you sophisticated suggestions and succinct insights.
Here’s how StockIQ helps inventory-based businesses stay ahead:
- Demand-driven planning: StockIQ generates advanced demand forecasts, based on more than just historical data. Its intelligent algorithm also incorporates trends, seasonality, volatility control, and bias detection, to provide your business with the most accurate forecasts possible.
- Intelligent dashboard: StockIQ’s dashboard gives you heightened visibility into everything from your inventory to your suppliers. From there, you can identify problems earlier, tighten inventory controls, and optimize resource usage.
- Automated processes: Don’t let its user-friendly interface fool you: StockIQ is advanced and utilizes technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate and simplify your processes.
- Advanced inventory analysis: StockIQ doesn’t just give you raw data. It also gives you helpful suggestions based on advanced analytics. For example, it’ll help you calculate safety stock levels, handle sporadic items, and take steps to avoid stockouts.
Setting up StockIQ for Success
To fully leverage StockIQ capabilities for supply planning success, optimizing your usage from the start is essential. This will ensure your business and team is getting the most out of StockIQ’s capabilities, and that the system seamlessly integrates with your existing supply chain operations.
Here are some key tips for getting the most out of StockIQ:
1. Integrate StockIQ with your ERP system
To make the most of StockIQ, you’ll need to integrate it with your current ERP. But don’t worry: StockIQ is designed explicitly for seamless ERP integrations, and can seamlessly connect to the top-used ERPs in the industry. Plus, StockIQ has a knowledgeable and dedicated Implementation Team, who are there to ensure a smooth integration process from the start.
2. Take advantage of the dashboards
When you start using StockIQ, you’ll quickly notice the dashboards on the homepage, which are driven by various alerts and inventory positions. This is where you’ll find key insights at a glance, and you can use it to understand the state of inventory quickly. When you want to dive deeper, you can easily access the raw data of those dashboards with the click of a button.
3. Make StockIQ’s forecasting work for you
StockIQ has several core functionalities, but demand forecasting is the heart of this platform, where other functionalities (such as inventory planning and replenishments) are rooted. There are plenty of unique forecasting features you can take advantage of to maximize your demand forecasts for your business.
For example, you can choose different forecast hierarchies depending on your needs (such as top down, middle out, and bottom up forecasts), as well as different categories such as product families, subcategories, and regions. StockIQ also supports multi-channel or omni-channel forecasting. If you want to know more about the StockIQ algorithm and what makes it different, you can check out this in-depth examination of our demand planning software.
4. Leverage ABC stratification
ABC stratification (also known as ABC analysis) is another helpful feature within StockIQ that can help you evaluate your inventory and make informed decisions. ABC analysis allows you to prioritize stock based on value and demand, using a simple method that categorizes inventory into three groups, based on their value to your business and how much of your total stock they account for. When you use StockIQ’s ABC analysis feature, you can quickly see how SKUs perform, improve inventory control, and improve your purchasing decisions.
5. Take advantage of StockIQ’s range of products
StockIQ is a comprehensive inventory management solution, and several core products can help you meet your business and inventory objectives. They include:
- Supplier performance: StockIQ’s supplier performance management tools help you stay on top of supplier activity, so you can make smarter business choices. Our Lead Time Viewer shows your Active Lead Times, ERP Provided Times, and Safety Stock Lead Times, so you can ensure your stock is always where it should be. You can also stay updated with timely alerts to help you watch your stock levels.
- Replenishment planning: Our replenishment planning tool helps you handle stock as efficiently as possible. Use daily auto-scheduling, master complex bills, and enjoy smart loading and balancing tools to help you boost shipping and stock management.
- SIOP: By combining sales, inventory, and ops planning, you can access all of the metrics you need for precise inventory control. You’ll get data sorted by product type or group, helping you sync goals and efforts across teams.
By keeping these best practices in mind, you’ll establish a solid foundation that allows StockIQ to drive smarter supply planning decisions.
Supply Planning? StockIQ Has You Covered
If you’re an inventory-based business looking to excel in today’s supply chain, you need advanced supply planning tools to forecast demand, manage inventory, and make intelligent decisions. That’s where StockIQ has your back.
StockIQ is a user-friendly supply chain planning suite, designed to help you boost operational efficiency, improve forecast accuracy, and simplify your strategic planning. Our tools give you a clear, accurate view of your inventory and expected consumer habits, so you can enhance and optimize how you tackle supply planning.
Interested in seeing how StockIQ can improve your business’ supply planning? Contact us today or request a StockIQ demo.
