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Example: Operations

Why did Reno run out, and why is so much cash sitting on shelves?

Golden joins weekly inventory snapshots to purchase orders, so you can see the stockout, the late shipment behind it, and the supplier who slipped.

The problem

Two questions from two directions

Renee plans inventory for a five-warehouse tool distributor. Two power tools ran out in Reno this spring, and sales wants to know why.

At the same time finance is asking why so much cash is tied up in stock that doesn't move. The answers live in two files, a weekly snapshot and a shipment log, that have never been lined up.

The solution

Snapshots and shipments, side by side

Add the shipment log as a second table, confirm the join on SKU and warehouse, and Golden lines up every stockout with the orders that should have prevented it.

Promised and actual lead times stay as separate fields, so an order still on the water never gets counted as on time.

Step by step

How Golden answers it

1

Heatmap weeks of cover

SKU by warehouse, colored on a scale centered at 4 weeks. In mid-May the only zero cells are Reno's two Pacific Rim power tools, and every Outdoor Equipment row runs deep on the high side.

2

Watch on-hand fall through the reorder point

A combo chart of Reno stock as bars and reorder point as a line. From mid-March the bars drop to zero after each reorder instead of recovering.

3

Lay the shipments on a gantt

One bar per order, from order date to delivery, colored by supplier. Pacific Rim's bars roughly double in length from March.

4

Line up lead time by supplier

Average actual lead days by month. Three lines are flat. One steps from 12 to 25.

5

Find the cash

A treemap of inventory value by category, colored by weeks of cover. Outdoor Equipment is the big, dark block.

What you'll find

One supplier, one overstocked category

  1. 01
    Pacific Rim Components' lead time went from 11.9 days to 25.3 days for orders placed from March 2025. The other three suppliers didn't move.
  2. 02
    All 55 Pacific Rim orders since March 1 are late or still in transit, against 31 of the other 1,318 shipments.
  3. 03
    Reno's Compact Impact Driver hit zero in 5 weekly snapshots from mid-March; the 18V Cordless Drill in 3 from mid-May. No other line hit zero all year.
  4. 04
    Outdoor Equipment carries 26.2 weeks of cover against roughly 5 for everything else, and $690K of stock, nearly as much as the other four categories combined.
Go further

Fix the reorder point

Forecast weekly demand 8 weeks ahead, then size a new reorder point to cover the 25-day lead time plus safety stock. For the Reno impact driver it lands well above today's setting.

Generate a data story for the supplier review (the gantt and the lead-time line make the case in two slides), and share the dashboard with each warehouse manager on their own warehouse.

Next step

Catch the next stockout early

Bring your inventory snapshots and shipment log, and see which supplier is costing you sales.