As a young man, our founder, King Harrison III, attended a basketball camp at Davidson University. Lefty Driesell (Davidson’s coach) held that clinic and enlisted the help of his team to teach. However, the guest instructor that brought King to that clinic was none other than Pistol Pete Maravich! What a fantastic opportunity to learn from one of the best ball handlers the sport has ever known.
What followed was two hours of Pete Maravich working with the kids to help improve their own ball handling. In fact, it was two hours of…chest pass….bounce pass…chest pass…bounce pass. Then back to the chest pass…for two hours.
King didn’t realize it at the time, but Pistol Pete’s message was loud and clear and taught King a valuable lesson that he carries to this day. Don’t worry about doing anything fancy until you have the basics right.
As we travel the country and talk to wholesalers and retailers about ways to improve their inventory, invariably they are looking for an advanced tool that will solve their most pressing challenges. Can K3S improve our fill rates? Can K3S reduce inventory? Can K3S provide better forecasting? The answer to all of these questions (and many, many more) is in all likelihood yes. But before we get there, let’s check the basics. Do you know the “bounce pass”?
There are a few things that any purchasing package needs to do its job properly, and it’s amazing how often we find prospects who can’t provide those. If you are thinking about adding a purchasing software (or any other “bolt-on” for that matter), here are a few things you should ensure are correct in your system to have the best chance of success:
- On-hand inventory: This is critical to calculating how much inventory is needed to fulfil anticipated demand.
- True Demand: While we also like to know what you sold, we need to know what the customer actually wanted! This is what we should forecast from.
- On-Order Inventory: Once we know how much is on hand and how much we anticipated selling, we need to know what inventory is yet to be received!
- Service Level Targets: What service level do you find acceptable for each product? This is needed to determine how much safety stock is required.
Once we have all of these numbers consistently accurate, we can do some pretty fancy stuff for your company. But before we get to that, we need to make sure you have the basics right. Chest pass…bounce pass…chest pass…
