How you can better manage your inventory

 I was talking to an electronics manufacturer today about the current business climate.  Granted, there are a lot of things wrong, but he mentioned something that was going right. Inventory levels in his supply chain were good.
The last time the business climate was so ugly, orders dropped precipitously and there were billions of dollars of excess inventory in the channel. Most of that was written off as a loss.
I asked him what his distributors were doing right. Among the measure they took are:
More frequent forecasts. Quarterly forecast are not conducive to a lean supply chain.
Applied IT.  You don’t need to drop millions of dollars on sophisticated supply chain management software, but you do have to make sure office A (or factory A) is connected to office B (or factory B). Or, make sure critical people have access to your inventory levels and those inventory levels are current.
A reality check. It’s tempting to accept a big order at face value. But check the historic buying patterns of your distributor or customer. Does something look out of sync? Double-checking an order shows you are on the ball and might save you some excess inventory in the future.