I walked into a client’s warehouse in the middle of a July heatwave. The racks were full, the bins looked organized, and the warehouse manager was proud of his “6-week supply” rule. Then we pulled up the last-movement dates. That walk changed how we ran the entire ERP Consulting review.
The 18-Month Shelf Test
We made a game of it. Every bin that hadn’t been touched in 18 months got a red dot. By day two, the warehouse looked like it had measles: 23% of their 5,000 SKUs hadn’t moved in over a year. That’s roughly $800,000 of cash sitting as dead weight.
Nobody was stealing. Nobody was careless. The problem was that the reorder points were set back when the company had one product line and three loyal customers. Demand had changed, but the minimums hadn’t.
Until You Set a Review Schedule, the Data Won’t Save You
Here’s what we did: we ran a slow-mover report every Friday instead of once a quarter. Every item with zero movement for 120 days got flagged to a human, not an algorithm.
- Set reorder points from the last 12 months of actual demand, then review them every quarter
- For any SKU with zero sales in 4 months, cut the reorder quantity by half automatically
- Do a physical “dust walk” twice a year — walk every aisle and touch anything that looks forgotten
The result? Within five months they freed up $340,000 in working capital and cut their stock write-off line by over 60%.
Why This Task Belongs to a Business Manager, Not an IT Guy
The ERP Consulting team built the reports, sure. But the decision to kill a slow-mover is yours, not your software’s. A system will show you the numbers; you have to make the uncomfortable call.
Start tomorrow with the simplest possible question: walk your floor, find one thing that hasn’t moved in a year, and ask the people who use it every day whether they’d cry if it disappeared.