Private Equity Operational Dashboards for Uncovering Trends and Making Data-Driven Decisions — Part 2: Inventory Management Dashboards
In part one of this blog, we showcased private equity sales performance dashboards for a private equity-backed machinery dealership chain. In that piece, we outlined the insights the dashboards provided and the actions/decisions they impacted. In this blog, we’ll continue our look at operational dashboards and have a look at inventory management dashboards.
Inventory management dashboards tell you more than simply how much inventory you have on hand, what needs to be restocked, and what needs to be pushed. Inventory management dashboards help operations teams and leaders make decisions in areas like:
Production: What items are moving fast? Where do we need to increase production? Where do we need to slow down production?
Ordering: What items are most popular? Which are the least? What is the seasonality? How long does it take to get an item from a supplier? What do we need to order and when?
Marketing: What do we order or produce based on customer demand? How do we forecast future demand? What items are sitting on the shelves the longest? How do we market these to sell?
Finance: What are the storage and operating costs associated with our inventory? Where can we reduce costs? What is the depreciation rate of inventory?
Planning: How does our current inventory storage plan align with our goals? Does it make sense to have a centralized warehouse or partner with a third-party logistics company? How can we model the potential costs? How could current supply chain issues affect future inventory?
This post will focus on two types of inventory dashboards: aged inventory dashboards and inventory logistics dashboards.
Aged Inventory Dashboards
Inventory management is a delicate balance between having enough inventory in stock to meet customer demand and not having items sitting on shelves, depreciating, and taking up valuable space. Operations teams, executives, and private equity owners need the ability to quickly see what stock they have, how long it’s been there, and the costs associated with storing it.
The dashboard below provides the ability to monitor stock and track its depreciation over time. The stock is also clustered within age groups to give a better idea to managers about when they have to replace their assets. This aged inventory dashboard also provides instant access to:
- What inventory is at which location
- How long inventory has been on the shelf
- The original acquisition cost of the inventory
- The current value of the inventory
- The rate of depreciation
- Trends by location and product type
Inventory Logistics Dashboard
This inventory logistics dashboard goes a step further and provides more specific details on how the inventory is moved over time. In the case of this machinery dealership chain, they had several ways their products could be moved out of inventory, such as:
- Direct sale to a customer
- Rental to a customer
- Loan to another location or partner
- Use as a demo model
This dashboard analyzes how various products were moved in and out of inventory based on multiple traffic types, branch locations, and time periods. It provides managers and private equity owners with a logistics insight into how their stock touches every part of their business operations.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this series on operational dashboards for uncovering trends and making data-driven decisions. If you have any questions or want to see more dashboards, please contact us to connect with a data analytics dashboard specialist.
Related Content
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- Whiteboard Strategy Session: Advanced Analytics and Reporting for Private Equity
- Private Equity Roll-Up Strategies — Accelerated Value Creation Through Data and Analytics
- Your Roll-Up Strategy: What Should You Do About Disparate ERP Systems?
Originally published at https://aptitive.com on October 4, 2021.
