A Minimum for Every Warehouse

A building-supplies distributor keeps tile adhesive in five places: the main depot in Nairobi’s Industrial Area, branches in Mombasa, Kisumu and Eldoret, and a counter in Nakuru. Nairobi moves more in a morning than Kisumu moves in a week. Until this release the item had one reorder point — 40 bags — and every one of those buildings was measured against it.

Forty is too high for Eldoret and absurdly low for Nairobi. So the number was either ignored or set to suit the depot, and the branches lived with a reorder screen that was wrong for them every day.

A floor and a ceiling per warehouse

On the item’s Stock tab on the web, or the item’s detail screen in the mobile app, each warehouse can now have its own minimum and maximum. The minimum is the floor: at or below it, the warehouse needs stock. The maximum is the ceiling: what a refill should bring it up to. A warehouse with no row of its own falls back to the item’s reorder point, so you only set levels where the default is wrong.

Read the Kisumu row the way the reorder screen does. On hand is 22, the minimum is 30, so it is due. The suggestion is the gap to its maximum — 90 less 22 is 68 bags — not an arbitrary reorder quantity. Eldoret has a minimum and no maximum, so the screen fills to twice the minimum: 50 bags.

Eldoret is also the row the old screen could never produce. The branch has never held tile adhesive, so there was no stock record for it to be low against. The reorder screen for a warehouse now offers any item at or below that warehouse’s minimum, including items it has never held — which is exactly how you stock a product line in a branch for the first time.

A branch that has never stocked an item is the most out of stock it can be. It used to be invisible to the reorder screen for the same reason.

Move it before you buy it

Mombasa is sitting 30 bags above its ceiling while Kisumu is below its floor. Ordering 68 more from the supplier is not the cheapest answer to that. The transfer-balancing suggestions now measure each warehouse against its own minimum, so they can see that Mombasa has stock to spare above its floor and Kisumu needs it, and propose a transfer before anyone raises a purchase order. See inventory balancing and replenishment suggestions for how a suggestion becomes a transfer.

What still reads the item’s reorder point

One thing has not moved, and it is worth knowing before you rely on it. The low-stock alert — the notification that fires once when an item crosses its reorder point — still reads the item-level reorder point and the item’s total. Per-warehouse levels drive the reorder screen, the transfer suggestions and the status on the item page. So keep the item’s reorder point set to something sensible for the business as a whole; it is still the alarm, and it is still the fallback for any warehouse you have not given levels of its own.

1. Set levels where the default is wrong

   Start with your largest and smallest sites. Most items need levels in two or three warehouses, not all of them.

2. Leave the item reorder point on

   It drives the low-stock alert and covers every warehouse without a row.

3. Open the reorder screen per warehouse

   Filter to one warehouse and the list is that branch’s floor and ceiling, not the company’s.

4. Check transfers before purchases

   A branch above its maximum is stock you have already paid for.

Levels can also be read and written through the API — GET and PUT on an item’s warehouse levels — for anyone setting them from a planning spreadsheet. For the thinking behind a sensible minimum, reorder points and safety stock is the place to start.

Frequently asked questions