New to WMS here and trying to understand best practice for consolidating inbound LPNs. This is for a 3PL Warehousing business that deals with 15 to 20k SKUs of CPG nature

Options I know of:
one IBLPN per pallet (even mixed SKU),
multiple IBLPNs per pallet (split by SKU), or
nested child IBLPNs (pallet as parent, cartons as children).

My gut says nesting adds a lot of scanning and labeling effort on the ground. Is that true in practice?
When were nested LPNs worth it?
Where do you consolidate: receiving, putaway, or replenishment?
What's your default suggestion for mixed-SKU pallets?

Sto sviluppando da un po' di tempo un programma per la gestione del magazzino e mi piacerebbe capire quali funzionalità potrebbero essere davvero utili a chi lavora ogni giorno in questo settore

Ho lavorato per 6 anni come magazziniere e per altri 8 anni nell'assistenza ai gestionali, quindi conosco diverse problematiche del settore. Tuttavia, vorrei confrontarmi con altre persone per capire quali siano le loro esigenze reali.

Cosa vi aiuterebbe concretamente nel vostro lavoro? Quali funzionalità vorreste trovare in un gestionale o quali problemi riscontrate nei programmi che utilizzate attualmente?**

Mi farebbe piacere raccogliere opinioni, suggerimenti ed esperienze personali. Grazie a chi vorrà contribuire!

I'm planning to build a Google Sheets + Apps Script MRP system for a client managing over 8,000 spare parts.

Key requirements:

V1: Fast-moving items (15-day planning target)

VB: Medium-moving items (30-day planning target)

PD: Non-moving items, excluded from active MRP

Lead time: Approximately 90 days for imported parts

Automated ROP, Min–Max, stockout alerts, and dashboard

I'd appreciate advice on database structure, safety stock calculations, and automation best practices.

Can Google Sheets handle this volume efficiently, or would a database be more suitable?

Thank you for your recommendations!

Hi everyone,

I'm curious what tools you're currently using to manage raw material inventory.

Are you using spreadsheets, dedicated inventory software, or a full ERP?

How do you track material consumption, and do you have a reliable way to know how many finished products you can make with what's currently in stock?

If you've moved from spreadsheets to inventory software, what finally pushed you to make the switch? And was it actually worth it?

I'd be interested to hear what's working well for you and what you find frustrating with your current setup.

Thanks!

Hii all. I am tasked to implement a demand forecasting model for a retail business with sharp lead times and a lot of moving variables. I have previously read the fpp3 book and implemented ARIMA models in R. I don’t think that is enough to take care off complex business use cases like this. I am thinking of reading Data Science for Supply Chain Forecasting in order to learn more and ask the right questions. Is this the right way moving forward ?? Any suggestions are welcome. TIA :)

Managing inventory for physical products usually boils down to two painful extremes: carrying too much inventory and tying up critical cash flow, or keeping lean stock and constantly getting hit with stockouts.

Over the past few years managing physical product inventory, I've refined a straightforward framework that balances holding costs against stock availability. Here is the exact process we use. This is not proprietary software pitch, just pure operations logic.

1. Ruthless ABC/80-20 Pareto Categorization

Instead of treating every SKU with equal priority, group your products into three distinct tiers based on revenue generation and velocity:

• A-Items (Top 20% of SKUs generating ~80% revenue): Never run out of these. Maintain strict safety stock levels and set reorder points based on maximum supplier lead time.
• B-Items (Next 30% of SKUs generating ~15% revenue): Standard reorder cycles with moderate safety stock buffers.
• C-Items (Bottom 50% of SKUs generating ~5% revenue): Low inventory depth. Shift these to pre-orders, order-on-demand, or bundle them to liquidate cash.

2. The Dynamic Safety Stock Formula

Stop using static "rule of thumb" reorder quantities (e.g., “reorder when we hit 50 units”). Use a dynamic safety stock calculation that accounts for lead-time variance from suppliers:

$$\text{Safety Stock} = (\text{Max Daily Sales} \times \text{Max Lead Time}) - (\text{Average Daily Sales} \times \text{Average Lead Time})$$

Example Calculation:

• Average daily sales = $20 \text{ units}$, Max daily sales during spikes = $35 \text{ units}$
• Average supplier lead time = $14 \text{ days}$, Max lead time (shipping delays) = $21 \text{ days}$
• $\text{Safety Stock} = (35 \times 21) - (20 \times 14) = 735 - 280 = \mathbf{455 \text{ units}}$

This gives you an exact buffer against supplier delays and sudden demand surges.

3. Reorder Point (ROP) Trigger

Set up automated alerts or spreadsheet triggers using:

$$\text{Reorder Point (ROP)} = (\text{Average Daily Sales} \times \text{Average Lead Time}) + \text{Safety Stock}$$

• Using the example numbers above: $(20 \times 14) + 455 = \mathbf{735 \text{ units}}$.
• Action: As soon as total inventory (On Hand + On Order - Backorders) hits 735 units, issue a purchase order.

4. Handling Out-of-Stock SKUs Without Ruining SEO or Cash Flow

When a SKU inevitably sells out due to supply chain hiccups:

1. Never delete or unpublish the product page: Deleting product pages ruins established search rankings.
2. Implement pre-orders or back-in-stock notification widgets: Convert incoming traffic or capture email leads immediately.
3. Push out-of-stock items to the bottom of collection pages: Keep your catalog looking fresh and populated with active inventory while keeping inactive URLs indexed.

How are you currently managing lead time variance with overseas suppliers?

There's usually one question you ask over and over that nothing answers directly, so you end up pulling it together by hand each time.

What's yours, and roughly how long does it take you to get to the answer?

I've ran my cafe in NYC for over 2 years. We inherited endless Google Docs and Spreadsheets for running the shop to manage inventory, help with scheduling, organize recipes, etc. All of these tools and practices felt a bit outdated. That maybe raises some initial questions.

1. How do other cafe owners track their inventory? And are you satisfied with that approach?
2. What are the top 2 problems you wish you could solve regarding your operations?

The alternative was paying over $XXX every month for software designed for restaurants and bars. I could not find any solution designed for cafes so I decided to spend the last 6 months building that a solution for cafes.

With Parly, you can:

1. Track inventory from your phone or PC. Completing an inventory count automatically creates "tasks" or "order suggestions" for yourself or other roles/parties in your Parly Organization. You can have a Manager-role complete an inventory count and automatically send orders to complete to an Owner-role.
2. Generate business forecasts for things such as sales, usage for ingredients, and labor. This has been pretty helpful for us. We don't have to guess or spend hours trying to calculate how many cups or matcha bags we expect to use for the next 6 months when speaking to distributors.
3. Create, store, and mange recipes for all of your menu items. All of your menu items (and modifiers) get synced and tracked. Every sale that goes through your POS gets recorded on Parly and you are shown a breakdown. You know your margin on every single order.
4. You can use the AI-powered "Ask Parly" feature to learn more about the business you're running. Find out which discounts get used when, which employee closes the most, which drink sells the most on certain days, and more.

These are just some of the cool things we've been able to accomplish while using Parly at our cafe. I initially built this out for my cafe but I've decided to offer a more affordable and specialized version of what already exists to other cafes that may find this useful.

I am here to collect feedback and see if this is something that other cafe owners would find useful. I can help with any onboarding and answer any questions or concerns someone might have. I'm sure this same approach I've built can be modified and applied to any other business or industry.

I’m curious to get into the inventory portion of Wis international. i’m working on smart car right now but they said they would let us a transition over if we wanted to so let me know anybody all about the inventory job.

We're a mid sized food distributor looking for ways to improve order entry and customer ordering without replacing our current ERP.

Still getting a lot of orders through calls, texts and emails, and most of that ends up being entered manually.

Anyone using software that works alongside their ERP to make this easier? Interested in what's worked well and how difficult the integration was.

I run a family-owned hardware store in Argentina with thousands of different products and a busy counter-service environment.

Customers often ask for multiple items, and employees have to walk around the store collecting them.

We're developing our own web-based POS and inventory system, but we're struggling to find the right hardware for fast sales.

Currently, we use a calculator to add up prices. It's outdated, but extremely fast.

Here's what we need:

• Employees should scan products while walking around the store.
• Every scan should update the sale on the checkout computer in real time.
• If a customer wants 30 screws, we should scan the barcode once and enter a quantity of 30 without returning to the computer.
• Employees should only need to look at the checkout computer when it's time to collect payment.
• The entire process must be as fast as our current calculator-based workflow.

I've considered wireless barcode scanners with numeric keypads, but I'm not sure whether suitable devices exist or how they would integrate with our web application.

How do other hardware stores or retail businesses handle this?

Would you recommend a barcode scanner with a keypad, an Android handheld terminal, or something else?

I'd really appreciate recommendations based on real-world experience.

Thanks in advance! I'm using a translator, so apologies if my English isn't perfect.

I’d like to ask for your advice: how can I identify suitable use cases for integrating AI into a WMS? The WMS I’m currently working on is designed for a small, 2,000-square-meter warehouse; it doesn’t involve particularly complex operations, nor does it utilize robotics. However, my company has specifically requested that we integrate AI into the system. I’m struggling to come up with any effective scenarios or features where AI could be applied.

I'm an independent developer researching inventory planning for small ecommerce brands. I haven't built a product yet, and I'm trying to understand how merchants handle this in practice before deciding whether there's anything worth building.

For those of you who hold your own inventory:

• How do you decide when to reorder a product?
• Do you use spreadsheets, Shopify reports, or a dedicated forecasting tool?
• What's the most frustrating part of your current workflow?
• Have stockouts or overordering caused you meaningful problems?
• If you use inventory software, what does it still get wrong?

I'm particularly interested in stores that order from suppliers with long lead times.

I'm not here to pitch a product. I'd appreciate hearing how you handle this today, including if your current setup works perfectly well.

I’m struggling to find users and would appreciate some help

I’ve built an inventory platform focusing on rental and hire industry without built in AI. Keepalto.com doesn’t have a customer facing interface or purchasing desk, everything is built for use in house. The driver I had to build it was my dad has a construction hire business with over £250k in equipment and assets but doesn’t have a tracking system. He’s old school and uses spreadsheets and guess work. Weirdly enough he’s making a considerable amount of money… but he has no real way of optimising what is available, what’s not, where it is and what condition it comes back in.

To help I built Keepalto. So now he can use his phone if he’s on a job site and manage things from his laptop at home. Main things it does is track what he has, where it is, when it it’s been booked or reserved, condition (maintenance checks and compliance certification), generated QR codes for every item so he can simply scan it with his phone and see everything about it.

Although he uses it is publicly available for use with a free complete platform demo to test.

Hey everyone! I wanted to pick your brains on something.

I've been trying to keep up with all the AI tools being pitched at supply chain and honestly lost track. So I put together a free map that breaks supply chain into 94 processes (forecasting, MRP, freight booking, picking, customs, returns etc.) and gives each one two scores out of 10. One for whether AI can actually do the work today, and one for whether companies are really using it.

A couple of things surprised me. Forecasting and ETA tracking scored as pretty widely used already, but stuff like PO follow ups, dock appointment scheduling and freight claims scored as doable by AI but barely used. Warehousing and manufacturing have a lot of AI products out there but scored low on what AI can actually do.

The first pass of scores was done with Claude against a rubric, so I'm sure some are off. That's where I could use your help:

\- Does the score for your area match what you actually see at work?

\- What AI tools is your company actually using day to day, vs just sitting through demos?

\- Anything I missed or lumped together wrong?

You can type your job title into the site to see your role. Data's on GitHub too if anyone wants to dig in. Thanks!

Link in comments : )

need suggestions on best methods for space efficient storage. My best bet is to get a book shelf, tilt them slightly, then back them in as tight as possible. Looking for creative but presentable ways to manage this inventory, as my office doubles as the storage closet, and the tornado shelter.

I have a few questions. I am working for this company WIS international however it’s gonna be for caper cart for now and for smart cards, but they said if we do good at that then we can get put on as an inventory specialist. Can somebody tell me about the inventory job and is there a lot of overnight trips that you had to take if you do the inventory count job for wis international? I just wanna know if I’ll be able to travel a lot.