Inventory Planner Essentials helps you avoid stockouts and minimize overstocks by making dynamic recommendations of how much inventory to purchase. To provide these recommendations, it uses a configurable days of stock value instead of fixed minimum inventory levels.

The days of stock, or stock cover, is the amount of time you’d like to be able to keep inventory on hand without having to restock. For example, if you want to order enough stock for two weeks, your days of stock is 14 days.

The days of stock figure is determined by several factors, such as storage space, expected turnover and product longevity. There is no one set ‘best’ value for all variants at all retailers. As you are the expert on these factors in your business, you should configure the days of stock setting in Inventory Planner Essentials based on your goals.

Days of stock handles the need for safety stock. It’s important to think about your safety stock dynamically and not as a static number, because if the demand for a product is increasing, your safety stock buffer should also be increasing in proportion to the demand.

If you think about safety stock as a static number that's tied to either the number you’re ordering right now or the stock you have right now, you aren't accounting for growth in the demand of the product. However, if you tie it to your forecasted sales velocity instead, then it will automatically adjust as demand does.

From Chinese New Year to the festive period and summer vacation season, there are certain times in the calendar when your factories and warehouses may close or slow down, and it’s important you’re prepared.

Inventory Planner Essentials makes it simple to ensure you have enough stock to meet demand even if your suppliers are unavailable by tweaking your days of stock setting. To work out how much to tweak it by, take your existing days of stock value and add in the relevant number of days to cover the period of downtime. For example, if the factory is going to be closed for a week, add 7 days to the days of stock.

You can change the default lead time and days of stock against each vendor, which can then be applied to all variants assigned to the vendor. For even finer control, you can override the values for each variant in the Purchase screen, using bulk actions to update multiple variants more efficiently.

Learn more about adjusting your lead times and days of stock here.

After your supplier holiday has passed, you will need to reset your days of stock back to your normal timings.