Tag
inventory planning
Production-planning notes filed under inventory planning.
- 01
Available-to-Promise for CPG Lines: Quote Ship Dates From Your Schedule, Not Your Gut
A buyer wants 40 pallets by Thursday. Available-to-promise (ATP) is the discipline that lets you answer from your master schedule instead of guessing — without double-booking a line or robbing the next customer's allocation.
Read post - 02
Sizing Safety Stock for Lead-Time Variability: King's Combined Formula
Most schedulers buffer only demand swings and silently assume a punctual supplier. Learn King's combined safety-stock formula, run a CPG worked example, and see when a late supplier—not your forecast—drives the stockout.
Read post - 03
The Decoupling Point: Where Your CPG Line Should Stop Making to Forecast and Start Making to Order
Every CPG line runs two scheduling worlds at once: forecast-driven push upstream and order-driven pull downstream. The customer order decoupling point decides where one ends and the other begins — and where you hold your inventory.
Read post - 04
CONWIP: One Card Cap to Control Your CPG Line's WIP and Lead Time
CONWIP puts a hard ceiling on total work-in-process by circulating a fixed number of release cards. Learn how to size the cap, how it beats push and simplifies Kanban, and when to use it on a CPG line.
Read post - 05
Forecast Value Added: Is Your Demand Override Beating a Naive Guess?
Forecast Value Added audits your forecasting process step by step, proving whether each analyst override actually beats a dumb naive benchmark. Here's how to run FVA on a CPG line—and why a failed override is really a scheduling error.
Read post - 06
Continuous vs. Periodic Review: Why CPG Lines Reorder on a Clock, Not a Trigger
A continuous-review reorder point assumes you can produce the instant you cross it. A shared CPG line can't. Here's why periodic review and order-up-to targets model your floor honestly — and why the review gap quietly inflates your safety stock.
Read post - 07
The Bullwhip Effect on Your CPG Line: Why a 5% Shelf Wobble Becomes a Whipsawing Schedule
Your inbound order signal swings harder than consumers actually buy. That jumpiness is a structural amplification called the bullwhip effect. Here's how to name it, measure it, and dampen it from the plant floor.
Read post - 08
Croston's Method for Intermittent SKUs: Forecasting the Slow Movers Your Average Keeps Getting Wrong
Standard moving averages and exponential smoothing quietly mis-forecast your sporadic SKUs. Croston's method forecasts demand size and demand interval separately — here's how it works, when to use SBA or TSB, and how to decide which SKUs need it.
Read post - 09
Little's Law for CPG Schedulers: Predict Line Lead Time from WIP and Throughput
The line is running at rate, yet orders keep shipping late. Little's Law explains why: lead time is WIP divided by throughput. Learn to predict flow time, cap queues, and quote promise dates you can keep.
Read post - 10
Tracking Signal: Catch a Biased Forecast Before It Corrupts Your Schedule
A forecast rarely fails loudly — it drifts. Learn how the tracking signal, a cheap MAD-based trip-wire, flags persistent forecast bias so you can fix it before it inflates run sizes or triggers repeat stockouts.
Read post - 11
The Newsvendor Model: How Much to Make for a One-Shot CPG Run
Holiday packs, LTOs, and short-code items give you exactly one shot at the run quantity. The newsvendor model turns overage-vs-underage costs into a defensible batch size using one number: the critical ratio.
Read post - 12
Dynamic Lot-Sizing for Lumpy CPG Demand: When One Fixed Batch Size Stops Working
EOQ and EPQ assume steady demand. Real CPG demand is lumpy — promo spikes, seasonal resets, uneven retailer orders. Here's how lot-for-lot, POQ, Silver-Meal, and Wagner-Whitin size runs when net requirements change every week.
Read post - 13
Economic Production Quantity (EPQ): Sizing Batches When Your Line Makes and Ships at Once
Run long to dilute a painful changeover, or run short to avoid drowning in inventory? EPQ is the math for the sweet spot — built for a line that fills stock gradually while demand keeps pulling it down.
Read post - 14
Cycle Service Level vs. Fill Rate: The Service Metric That Sizes Your Safety Stock
Setting "95% service" means nothing until you know which 95%. Learn how cycle service level and fill rate differ, why they diverge, and how each one sizes your safety stock and run cadence.
Read post - 15
Shelf-Life-Constrained Production Scheduling: Sizing Runs So Perishable SKUs Don't Expire
Classic lot-sizing math quietly assumes product lives forever. In food and beverage it doesn't. Here's how to cap production runs at the shelf-life-feasible quantity so perishable SKUs sell before they expire — without stocking out.
Read post - 16
ABC-XYZ Segmentation for CPG: Which SKUs Deserve Tight Scheduling and Safety Stock
You can't manage 400 SKUs the same way. Learn how ABC-XYZ segmentation ranks SKUs by dollar impact and demand variability, so you spend scheduling attention and safety stock where they actually pay off.
Read post - 17
EPEI (Every Product Every Interval): How Often Should Your Line Make Each SKU?
EPEI is the one number that names your production rotation — how often each SKU comes around. Here's what it means, why smaller is usually better, and how to calculate and shrink it on a real CPG line.
Read post - 18
Heijunka for CPG Lines: Turning Lumpy Demand Into a Schedule the Floor Can Run
Forecasting tells you how much to make. Heijunka tells you in what rhythm and sequence. Here's how production leveling smooths lumpy CPG demand into a repeatable schedule that protects fill rate and your changeover budget.
Read post - 19
Stop firefighting stockouts
A stockout is rarely a surprise — it's a slow signal nobody had time to read. Read the few signals that matter early, and the fixes stay cheap.
Read post - 20
Forecasting that survives contact with the floor
Tie par levels to how product actually moves — with the right window, the right buffer, and current data — and the Tuesday surprises mostly stop.
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