Safety stock exists for which of the following reasons? To provide protection against the uncertainties of supply and demand.

What is the main reason for having safety stock?

Protection against demand spikes – Safety stock protects you against the sudden demand surges and inaccurate market forecasts that can happen during a busy or festive season. It serves as a cushion when the products you’ve ordered take longer to reach your warehouse than you expected. It ensures that your company doesn’t run out of popular items and helps you keep fulfilling orders consistently.

Which of the following statement is true about safety stock?

D. the higher the profit margin per unit, the higher the safety stock necessary. The answer is true regarding safety stock.

Under what circumstances would the amount of safety stock would held be?

When there are considerable fluctuations in lead time and/or consumption, safety stock should be large. The stock is kept in large quantities because the demand of the product is supposed to surge quickly.b. When there is a minimal change in the lead time and consumption, safety stock should be kept at a small level.

How do you determine stock safety?

What is the safety stock formula? The safety stock formula is therefore: – = safety stock.

What is safety stock and why is it held?

Safety stock – Wikipedia Extra stock kept to mitigate risks Safety stock is a term used by to describe a level of extra stock that is maintained to mitigate risk of (shortfall in raw material or packaging) caused by uncertainties in supply and demand.

Adequate safety stock levels permit business operations to proceed according to their plans. Safety stock is held when uncertainty exists in demand, supply, or manufacturing yield, and serves as an insurance against stockouts. Safety stock is an additional quantity of an item held in the inventory to reduce the risk that the item will be out of stock.

It acts as a buffer stock in case sales are greater than planned and/or the supplier is unable to deliver the additional units at the expected time. With a new product, safety stock can be used as a strategic tool until the company can judge how accurate its forecast is after the first few years, especially when it is used with a (MRP) worksheet.

• The less accurate the forecast, the more safety stock is required to ensure a given level of service.
• With an MRP worksheet, a company can judge how much it must produce to meet its forecasted sales demand without relying on safety stock.
• However, a common strategy is to try to reduce the level of safety stock to help keep inventory costs low once the product demand becomes more predictable.

That can be extremely important for companies with a smaller financial cushion or those trying to run on, which is aimed towards eliminating waste throughout the production process. The amount of safety stock that an organization chooses to keep on hand can dramatically affect its business.

Which two things drive the need for safety stock?

Safety Stock – How Much is Needed? – Posted on November 15, 2016 By John Kimball, Senior Consultant, Lanham Associates There are only two reasons to have safety stock: uncertainty of demand and uncertainty of supply. And the uncertainty is only important during the time periods when your supply chain has little or no flexibility to change.

Uncertainty of demand. Uncertainty of supply. The time period with little or no flexibility to change.

Uncertainty of Demand To predict future demand with more certainty, start with getting sales usage history that accurately represents likely usage in the future. Ideally your demand planning and replenishment system provides a best-fit formula for every item. (See Getting Sales History Right for Forecasting,) – Consider:

You may have a situation where a major customer has a select group of items, and after you generate the forecast, further improvement can be achieved through a collaboration process where you get useful amendments to the forecast from the customer. In cases where there is a special event or promotion that will drive additional sales, it is helpful to record these quantities separately from the total item forecast so they can be seen and managed. When new products are introduced, you can assign a “new item” strategy and increase the frequency of the demand plan review so they can be managed until there is sufficient sales usage history and can then be managed using a best fit formula solution.And finally, getting and maintaining a high level of accuracy in the demand data and improving the flow of information also reduces uncertainty of demand.

Uncertainty of Supply To maintain certainty of supply, begin by being the best customer you can be. Be a customer that collaborates with your suppliers by sharing your forecast for their items. Suppliers will appreciate this and return the favor with improved delivery performance.

Next, you can improve your replenishment planning process in a way that efficiently and quickly guides you to action. Consider how the purchase order is sent to the supplier and whether that can be improved via mail, fax, e-mail or EDI. And, similar to demand data, getting and maintaining a high level of accuracy in the supply data and improving the flow of information also reduces uncertainty of supply.

Time Period with Little or no Flexibility to Change Question whether your review cycle for each supplier can be revised to a schedule whereby you review and order from each supplier more frequently with the aid of an improved forecasting and replenishment planning solution.

For example, with a forecasting and replenishment solution that runs daily and prompts specific actions, you’ll be able to reduce inventories that are held just-in-case someone missed a call to action. Plan for and expect lead times to be reduced by looking for and taking advantage of every lead time reduction opportunity (See 10 Lead Time Reduction Tips to Making Forecast Errors Less Painful,) How Much Safety Stock? Once you are actively managing and minimizing uncertainty of demand, uncertainty of supply and the time period with little or no flexibility to change, the need for safety stock will be greatly reduced.

Your focus will shift from protecting against many stockout conditions to much fewer conditions. Now each time safety stock is proposed you can determine if reducing uncertainty of demand, uncertainty of supply or the time period, with little or no flexibility, can be reduced instead.

What are the factors which determine the stock level?

Maximum stock level calculation – The maximum stock level is calculated taking into consideration factors such as capital, product consumption rate, available warehouse space, risk of deterioration and obsolescence, and economic order quantity, among others. There are four major variables involved in calculating your company’s maximum stock level:

Reorder point. The reorder point is the level at which you need to procure new products to avoid a stockout, Replenishment quantity. This is the exact number of items you need to replenish your inventory. The amount of stock should be neither too high, leaving you with excessive capital tied up, nor too low, amounting to insufficient safety stock, You can use the EOQ (economic order quantity) formula, also known as the Wilson formula, to obtain this value. It consists of calculating how often to place an order and in what quantity, under the assumption that demand is constant and the supplier’s conditions are fixed. Minimum demand. This is the minimum amount of goods consumed. Lead time. Lead time constitutes the time elapsed from the moment a purchase order is placed with a supplier until the goods are received.

Using these variables, the maximum inventory level calculation would be as follows: Maximum stock level = Reorder point + Replenishment quantity – (Minimum demand x Lead time) Source: Supply Chain Intelligence: Application and Optimization by Kaushik Kumar and J.

• Paulo Davim Let’s take a look at an example,
• Imagine that fictitious cork company Orch Kork wants to know the ideal maximum stock level for its warehouse.
• The business has calculated the minimum demand level at 10,000 corks per week; thus, to properly serve its customers, it has to restock a total of 65,000 units every four weeks.

Its goal is for its stock levels to remain above 45,000 corks (the reorder point). In other words:

Reorder point = 45,000 Replenishment quantity = 65,000 Lead time = 4 weeks Minimum demand = 10,000

Orch Kork would apply the formula like this: Maximum stock level = 45,000 + 65,000 – (10,000 x 4) = 110,000 – 40,000 = 70,000 The maximum stock level is based on the company’s possible storage capacity and its purchasing or procurement policy

What is the difference between safety stock and inventory?

The cycle stock is the inventory expected to be sold based on demand forecasts, while safety stock is extra or buffer stock to meet excess demand, to protect against delayed shipments from your suppliers, or guard against unforeseen problems such as natural disasters.

Under what circumstances would the amount of safety stock held be zero?

Inventory is a highly visible asset and, in many companies, also the largest asset. In today’s highly competitive global economy, inventory has become the focus of improvement for many companies. Inventory typically includes: cycle stock and safety stock.

1. Cycle stock provides the buffer between replenishment deliveries and is fairly straightforward.
2. Safety stock protects against variability in both demand and lead times.
3. Therefore, setting the correct levels of safety stock is tricky and requires a thorough understanding of its drivers.
4. In our engagements, we have seen many inventory management professionals develop interesting approaches to managing and reducing their safety stock.

Here, we will discuss some of the common pitfalls in those approaches. Pitfall 1: Setting safety stock to zero will reduce inventory In some of our recent engagements, we observed that some supply chain professionals reduce safety stock to zero. They believe that they can reduce inventory if they set their safety stock to zero and in most cases, their inventory level did go down but so did their service level.

For most companies, this unwanted side-effect will end up costing them much more than the cost of some extra inventory. Therefore, we must better understand the relationship between safety stock and service level to effectively reduce inventory without reducing the service level. The most commonly used safety stock calculation is as follows.

The equation shows that the safety stock level is the multiplication of service level and variations in demand and lead time. In order to have zero safety stock, the z-score of the service level will have to be zero or variations in demand and lead time have to be zero. Assuming that average lead time, average demand, the standard deviation of the lead time and the standard deviation of the demand stay the same, any safety stock reduction will surely result in service level reduction. Pitfall 2: A textbook safety stock formula works for my supply chain One common mistake for many inventory practitioners is to use a textbook formula without fully understanding its range of applicability.

• For example, the safety stock formula described above is the most commonly used formula in inventory management today.
• This model will calculate the necessary safety stock to achieve a target service level provided that both lead time and demand are normally distributed.
• This model does not take into account the upstream failure rate, reorder period, or order quantity requirements which are part of cycle stock.

Therefore it is not recommended to use only this model if the upstream failure rate, reorder period, or order quantity requirements are significant business constraints in your supply chain. Pitfall 3: Safety stock declines as average supplier lead time declines Safety stock is designed to prevent stock-outs when there is variability in your demand and supply.

Case 1: Supplier A has an average lead time of 15 days and the standard deviation is 10 days. Case 2: Supplier B has an average lead time of 24 days and the standard deviation is 1 day.

Assuming the receipt period equals the total lead time, which supplier will reduce your safety stock? In both cases, you have to safeguard your inventory for 25 days, but the safety stock values are different for each of them. When you plug the values into the safety stock equation, Supplier B will have the lowest safety stock.

1. Since you know that the lead time is 24 days, your cycle stock will be ordered in such a way to satisfy the demand for 24 days and you only need to safeguard your supply with a safety stock for 1 extra day which is the variability here.
2. But in case of a 15 day lead time with 10-day variability you are sure that the product will reach you at an average of 15 days, but it may take up to 25 days so you will order your cycle stock so that it satisfies 15 days demand and safety stock to safeguard for the extra 10 days variability.

So the variability of your lead-time increases your safety stock. The same principle also works in the case of demand. The variability of your demand increases your safety stock. Let us look at an extreme case, if your supplier says he will have no lead time variability and your demand forecaster says he has predicted the demand perfectly, then you will have no use for the safety stock since you know what amount you need and how long it takes for your supplier to ship it to you. Safety stock is designed to prevent the majority of the stock-outs, not all of them. You can design your safety stock to satisfy your customer service level but there will always be stock-outs. One of the main variables when calculating safety stock is the service level.

• As shown in the graph, safety stock increases with the customer service level.
• When the service level values reach above 95% the safety stock number increase exponentially.
• Statistically speaking, the safety stock is infinite for a 100% service level.
• The safety stock equation is designed to deal with variability.

Variability means you cannot assure the lead-time of your suppliers and cannot forecast your demand perfectly. If you could do that, you wouldn’t need safety stock at all. With safety stock, sometimes you overshoot your inventory level and sometimes you fall below your predictions.

The first case leads to stock-outs and the second case leads to excess inventory. We can argue that in the second case we will never experience stock-outs and have 100% customer service level. But it doesn’t mean the safety stock was calculated for this scenario. The second case occurs because of the variability.

It costs you more when you have inventory on hand which has no demand. To sustain this, we should always have a balance between cost and service level. We can slowly improve our service level by decreasing our variability but with the limited practical resources, we will always have stockouts at some point in time.

The bottom line is stockouts are inevitable but we can keep them to a minimum by reducing variability. Conclusion Variability along the supply chain has a large impact on inventory requirements that is often not realized. Reducing inventory often requires understanding which drivers are the most important in your supply chain and alleviating them in order to improve overall performance.

Source: OPS Rules Blog: Insights into Supply Chain and Operations Strategy Related: Principals of Inventory Management

How does safety stock affect costs?

Impact of safety stock on carrying cost – The safety stock will result in an increase in the carrying cost of inventory. If an organization keeps a large safety stock, then it will lead to high carrying costs, and even small safety stock will result in a small increase in the inventory carrying cost.

Why reduce safety stock?

Challenges Associated With Excess Safety Stock – Safety stock might not seem like a big problem, but it does lead to difficulties within supply chain visibility and efficiency. Some challenges include:

• Safety stock lowers the efficiency of your inventory management strategy,
• It relies on outdated processes and data.
• It increases carrying costs for your organization.
• While it eliminates concern over stockouts, it fails to leverage advanced order fulfillment and shipping models.

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What is safety stock target?

Target Inventory Level vs Safety Stock – Safety stock is different from target inventory. Safety stock is an extra quantity of an item the company keeps to avoid being out of stock of that item. Target inventory is the quantity of a company item at a given moment.

What is the difference between safety stock and safety time?

Safety Stock and Safety Time – One way to ensure order fulfillment is by using safety stock – that extra edge used as a buffer between orders and on-hand inventory that allows a company to achieve high service levels and maintain customer satisfaction.

The retention of safety stock is an attempt to capture forecasted demand for a product. However, the caveat is that you understand that demand in the first place. Safety time is an attempt to leverage lead times to ensure that materials and supplies arrive just in time for the correct production level.

It may be based on actual lead time if there are few, or even a single, component and supply is predictable. Or a company may use a more that includes considerations such as internal review, supplier lead time, transportation, and other factors.

What is the purpose of safety stock in SAP?

Types of Safety Stock in SAP – The SAP ERP system offers two types of safety stocks: absolute safety stock and safety days’ supply. The absolute safety stock enables the system to subtract it from material availability calculations (net requirements calculations).

• The safety stock must always be available to cover for unforeseen material shortages or unexpected high demand.
• For days’ supply/safety time, the system plans the goods receipt in advance by the period specified as safety time.
• Thus, planned days’ supply of the stock, in fact, corresponds to the number of days specified as safety time.

The system shifts backs the date of the receipts by the number of working days and also takes the factory calendar into account. You make the relevant entries in the MRP 2 view of the material master, The system refers to the planning of a safety days’ supply as safety time. Let’s take a look at how the safety stock availability can be used in net requirements calculations and also the selection method that the system uses for receipts.

What is the purpose of safety stock is to eliminate?

Eliminate the possibility of a stockout due to supply chain failures.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of safety stock?

Excess Stock is a term used in inventory management, and is often called a number of different things; overstock, stock surplus, excessive stock, or excess inventory. No matter what you call it, one thing that remains constant is the threat excess stock represents to your company’s bottom line.

Companies that carry excess stock levels in their inventory typically find that the issue was caused by poor management of demand forecasting and replenishment or not properly tracking the life-cycle stages of a product. Excessive stock levels come with many different cost considerations that organisations should be concerned about.

First off, there is lost revenue associated with products being in inventory with little market demand. There are company dollars tied up in capital that is directly linked to the original purchase of the goods and there are associated costs to storing the inventory, sometimes referred to as “carrying costs”.

1. Carrying costs add up quickly across a number of different factors including, rent or mortgage payments, equipment costs, labor cost, utilities, insurance and interest that accrues on stock that has not been sold.
2. Excess stock is best classified as a declining stage of the product life cycle, which is represented in the graph below.

There is typically demand for the product, but it is beginning to phase out and organisations that do not actively monitor the demand stages of all their individually stocked items run the risk of getting stuck with a large quantity of excess stock due to poor reorder or replenishment practices. If not managed properly, a company can hope to sell off most of their excess stock to break even on their investment or only lose a small percentage of profit. That is of course best case. Excess stock that is not liquidated typically transitions to obsolete stock, which almost always leads to a large and painful expense on the books.

Besides the financial burden of carrying excess stock levels, there are a few advantages to always having inventory available. Below are three reasons why having excess inventory might be beneficial to your operations. Always having inventory on hand means always having inventory to sell when there are opportunities.

However, having a 100% fill rate is not always the best thing when you are trying to effectively manage your costs associated with your inventory. Smart inventory planners know they need to balance having low levels of inventory while also meeting a desired service delivery rate as close to 100% as possible.

At EazyStock, we call the process of attaining low inventory levels while maintaining a high service delivery level “inventory optimisation.” Higher safety stock levels result in there always being inventory available for when sales are made. This will help reduce lead-times of delivery, avoid stock outs and keep your customers happy.

Conversely as excess stock levels go up, so does your risk, as well as, the financial strain on your business. Companies that leverage an inventory optimisation software like EazyStock have the ability to more accurately calculate safety stock to ensure unnecessary replenishment is avoided.

• Watch a demo to see how this is accomplished.
• Most small businesses will see savings when purchasing supplies in bulk quantities, as most suppliers offer discounts to customers who order larger quantities.
• Business can also save on shipping costs for one large order instead of adding up shipping and handling costs from multiple smaller batch orders.

The risk with committing to larger batch orders is the market uncertainty of that products demand. On the flipside, companies that can intelligently predict their demand and forecast accordingly, will be able to strategically optimise their replenishment processes to obtain optimised pricing from suppliers while not burdening themselves with orders to large. Although there are a few operational advantages of carrying excess inventory, there are a number of financial reasons why you should not. Below are three of the top reasons why you need to continuously monitor your stock levels against your product life-cycles to ensure you keep inventory levels healthy.

• If your company holds a high level of inventory, it ties up business funds that the company could use in other areas such as research and development or marketing.
• New product development and marketing can bring additional business to the company, but holding high inventory levels does not.
• The cost of the inventory is not recouped by the organisation until the company sells the inventory or uses it to build customer orders.

There is also opportunity cost in carrying large quantities of slower turning products. These products eat up space in your warehouse when you could be holding faster moving, higher demand products instead. If you struggle with balancing warehouse space allocation, then you will want to do some research into ABC classification best practices.

Inventory storage is another cost of holding excess stock in a business. The cost of warehousing can include the warehouse space, utilities and maintenance of the storage area. Some supplies may require additional maintenance, such as temperature control to preserve the quality of the material. Companies that reduce inventory levels can store materials in a smaller area in the business and use the extra space for new product development.

Some companies can reduce inventory levels down by up to 30% by simply improving their forecasting methods and replenishment practices. Storing excess stock can lead to quality problems such as degradation and potential obsolescence. Companies may stock high levels of inventory in anticipation of demand for a recurring order with a long standing customer, however customers may change specifications or require different materials for future products over time.

• In this situation, the company must purchase new materials and supplies to build according to the new customer specifications, which leaves large quantities of excess or in some case obsolete inventory.
• Businesses can identify and isolate quality problems easily with smaller quantity or reorder purchases.

For example, in EazyStock, reorder points and replenishment parameters are automatically set per each inventory SKU, which reduces a company’s risk of ordering too much stock. Interested in learning how to drive down excess stock levels? Contact EazyStock to schedule a demo to discover how easy it is to drive down costs while increasing inventory performance and profitability. Schedule a Demo

Jack Gloop