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Recalculating reorder levels, order-up-to levels, safety stock and lead times

Adapted from the Pulse Dashboard fact sheet "Recalculate reorder levels, order up to levels, safety stock & vendor lead times", May 2022.

Ordering too early, too late, too much or too little comes back to four numbers: the reorder level (minimum), the order-up-to level (maximum), the safety stock level and the vendor lead time.

Most companies set all four when the item was created and never look back, even as usage and lead times change. Vendor lead times in particular are usually broad verbal estimates that nobody has checked against receiving history.

This is one of the most tedious and least accurate areas of Macola®, and it automates cleanly.

Setting it up

One-time setup. We translate your reorder and order-up-to calculation rules into SQL scripts driven by your own history — the previous 3, 6 or 12 months. Vendor lead times are calculated from the receiving history of the primary vendor for each item, over 6, 12 or 24 months.

The monthly routine

  1. Press Calculate Reorder Levels. The program recommends a new reorder level, order-up-to level and safety stock level for each item and location, following your inventory policy, and displays the existing and recommended values side by side.
  2. Override any recommendation that needs it.
  3. Press Update Reorder Levels to write the new values into your Macola® database.
  4. Press Update Lead Times to update the Macola® vendor lead times.

Two features worth knowing about

  • History. Press the History button for a full before-and-after view of every change that has been made.
  • Exclusions. Any item number can be excluded from the calculations — special-order items and maintenance items are the usual candidates.

Included in the Inventory Optimization module.

Support & contact

Our team is glad to help with anything from a quick question to a full implementation.