Inventory Management A-Z: Supply Chain & Business Operations (Udemy.com)

This MBA-style course prepares and empowers you to make a REAL difference. Turbo-charge your career, and your business performance, to the highest levels.

This course is for the new or aspiring operations manager, ambitious procurement professionals, striving logistics supervisors, hands-on production planners and practical business optimization analysts.

• Take control of your inventory management to have an impact and improve your business operations - manufacturing, services, industrial operations and production.

• Equip yourself to take a new leading role in your workplace - improving your processes, systems, business / organization.

• Understand the fundamentals and then the essential details of inventory management: the core business trade-offs, analysis, calculations and practical optimisation methods.

• Understand how demand forecasting, demand planning and inventory planning connect to better operational decisions.

• Build your understanding of Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP), Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) and the wider planning processes that drive inventory.

• Become the inventory and supply-chain authority in your team, equipped to improve the operations systems and performance in your business.

  
  

Specific Techniques, Concepts and Calculation Methods taught:

• Little's Law: Calculate your mathematical minimum WIP for your process

• Economic Order Quantity (EOQ): Master this common formula to minimise your total costs

• Price Break Model: An advanced EOQ method which lets us consider price discounts with order size

• ABC Analysis: Classify and group your inventory to prioritise attention

• Performance Metrics: Understand the most important and useful inventory KPIs, including Inventory Turns and Days on Hand

• Safety Stock Levels: Calculate and cover your risk using both basic and more advanced statistical methods step by step in Excel

• Demand Forecasting: Understand why forecasting matters, forecastability and the main qualitative and quantitative forecasting approaches

• Demand Management & Planning: Understand demand variability, how demand can be managed and how better planning supports inventory decisions

• Collaborative Planning: Explore CPFR, Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI), the Bullwhip Effect and approaches to smoothing demand

• S&OP: Understand how Sales & Operations Planning connects forecasts with inventory and production plans

• Materials Requirements Planning (MRP): Understand how material requirements and inventory planning support production

• Inventory Strategy: Understand Make-to-Stock, Make-to-Order, JIT and Postponement and how these choices affect inventory

  
  

Business operations come in all shapes and sizes with a host of unique challenges; but good inventory management is essential to them all. Whether you work in retail, manufacturing production, distribution and logistics, or even service companies such as restaurants, hospitality or health and beauty, having the right stock available whilst minimising costs and risk is a fundamental balance that can determine your business's success.

Strong inventory management also depends on understanding the demand that drives inventory. Forecasting, demand planning, ordering decisions and production planning all interact. This course therefore goes beyond simply calculating stock levels to help you understand how inventory fits into the wider planning and operations system.

Gaining control and continuously improving your business operations is essential to remaining competitive: improving profitability, customer experience and customer satisfaction, reducing costs and improving delivery.

Without a solid grasp of inventory, no operations manager, junior or senior, can competently or confidently look to improve their business, the processes, systems and teams that make it successful.

Take control of your career and equip yourself with a solid base in Inventory Management, full of practical insights and tools that you can use right now to unlock the potential of your business processes!

Course Sections:

1. Introduction to Inventory Management

2. What is Inventory?

3. Why do we "need" Inventory?

4. Costs of Inventory

5. KPIs, Metrics & Performance Management

6. ABC Analysis, Demand Types & Parts Segmentation

7. Summary Quiz 1

8. Inventory Dynamics

9. Economic Order Quantity - EOQ

10. EOQ Advanced: Price Break Model

11. Order Timing and Inventory Control

12. Safety Stock Calculations

13. Demand Forecasting

14. Demand Management and Demand Planning

15. Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP), MRP & Inventory Planning

16. Summary Test 2

17. Conclusion

18. Bonus Section

Course Extras

• Downloadable Section Summaries

• Working Exercises for practical training

• Section Quizzes to check your learnings as you go

• 2x Summary Tests to test and lock in your learning

Take control! Boost your career and your business! Start learning today!

1. Introduction to Inventory Management

Motorbiking "Inventory" down Africa

What is Inventory Management?

Why is Inventory Management Important?

Any Questions

Course Topics

2. What is Inventory?

What Is Inventory? Types, Functions & Locations

3. Why do we "need" Inventory?

Why do we "need" Inventory?

Why Else do we Hold Inventory?

Other "less good" Reasons for Inventory

Little's Law

Little's Law: The Camera Factory

Essential Buffer WIP and Bigger Objectives

4. Costs of Inventory

Costs and Financial View of Inventory

Ordering, Holding & Operational Costs

Scottish Whiskey

Stockouts, Risk & the Inventory Trade-Off

Rock Boat Analogy

5. KPIs, Metrics & Performance Management

Measuring Inventory Performance - Metrics & KPIs

Popular Inventory Metrics: GMROI, Shrinkage & Sell-Through

Inventory Turns and Days on Hand

Control Charts

"Inventory Dollar Days" and "Throughput Dollar Days"