How IMA Stock Smart Works

Forecasting

All businesses forecast in some form – some simply project:

  • Annual sales budget
  • Headcount requirements
  • Capacity planning

But for many businesses, as forecasting becomes more mandatory and more complex, they are challenged by:

  • Seasonality
  • High level of product promotion or new product introduction
  • Lead times of weeks or even months

Here’s just some of the functionality that IMA Stock Smart forecasting provides so that you can address those challenges:

  • Product/Customer or Product/Location-based forecasting
  • Location/Customer/Product also by Product only
  • Multiple forecast algorithms including ‘Optimal Fit’
  • Seasonality profiling
  • Trend profiling
  • Manual override where market knowledge or imported forecasts are available

Reordering

The IMA Stock Smart approach is to integrate forecasting into inventory management so that you can continually monitor and report on the effect of where your business is trending, whilst highlighting what needs to be done in order to meet your service level and inventory targets.

This provides our clients with a basic choice – simply review what the forecast is suggesting or alternatively, upload the forecast and drive the sourcing requirements in the host ERP system.

Here’s just some of the functionality that IMA reordering provides:

  • Automatically classify stock based on movements and sales value
  • Automatic ROP calculation based on stock classification
  • Suggested order calculation
  • Manual or imported reorder points
  • Demand planning based on forecast

Demand Resource Planning (DRP)

Demand Resource Planning gives an overall view of the stock situation of the current item as it ‘plays out’ over the subsequent weeks and months based on the forecast and current stock position.

Some features of the DRP module are:

  • Track suggested order placement throughout the coming year
  • Track both actual and suggested PO receipts over the coming year
  • Track stock holding throughout the year.

Inventory Control Dashboard

Use the Inventory Control Dashboard for an overview of the problem areas in your inventory.

Standard modules include :

  • Items currently out of stock
  • Potential stock outs
  • Excess stock
  • Excess on order
  • Inventory spread across classification

Inventory Analytics Dashboard

The Inventory Analytics Dashboard reports on your stock using a two dimensional classification system, the IMA RRSABC classification.  This classification is based on current stock value and the number of months with stock movements (i.e. sales orders). 

The data shown can be filtered to show the subsets of your overall inventory that you require.

Margin Analytics Dashboard

The Margin Analytics Dashboard reports on the sales and forecast margin of your stock using a two dimensional classification system, the IMA RRSABC classification. This classification is based on current stock value and the number of months with stock movements (i.e. sales orders)

The data shown can be filtered to show the subsets of your overall inventory that you require.

Promotions Management

The Promotions Management system can be used to handle promotion activity for either product/location or product/customer based systems. Some of the key functionality comprises:

  • Multiple predefined promotion quantity profiles.
  • Maintenance of promotion history.
  • Automatic adjustment to forecasts in the promotion time- frame to account for the additional expected sales.
  • Management of sales demand history post-promotion to adjust out the effects of a promotion.
  • Automatic promotion status updates to indicate running or forthcoming promotions.

Extensive Reporting

An extensive reporting system is available with the following features:

  • Extensive user-defined data filtering
  • User-defined multiple level grouping
  • Column sorting
  • User defined reports – save tailored version of the standard reports.
  • Export to Excel XLS
See how IMA Stock Smart works with your data