Amazon · Inventory
Eighty-five to ninety-two
I owned in-stock for the Southwest and took it from 85% to over 92%.
- 85% to 92%+
- Regional in-stock
- 5 to 10%
- How close forecasts landed to plan
- near 100%
- In stock and sold through, Valentine’s Day 2018
The problem
When a customer wants something in an hour, out of stock means lost. I owned in-stock for the Southwest, where the rate sat at 85%, and there was no shared tool for planning it.
What I did
I built a planning tool in SQL and Excel. It set safety stock by rule, adjusted the forecast by region, and planned inventory before and after big events. I wrote a playbook for getting ready for those events, and a way to reconcile finance’s top-down forecast with the item-level one built from the bottom up.
What changed
Regional in-stock went from 85% to over 92%. Forecasts landed within 5 to 10% of plan. On Valentine’s Day 2018 we were close to 100% in stock and sold nearly all of it. Amazon’s economists later scaled the tool, and the playbook was used across the network.