Balancing Supply and Demand
April 26, 2019Do I take a vacation, or put that money towards my retirement, or increase my down payment on a car? Do I go to the sandwich place a block away from my office? Or the one 15 minutes away that bakes their own fresh bread and that I could swear literally uses the secret ingredient love?
We are constantly faced with choices concerning the allocation of time, money and other scarce resources. There is always an opportunity cost – the loss of the potential gain that would have been realized had we made a different choice. For decisions on where to eat lunch, this is likely insignificant, but for bigger decisions this can have long-lasting impacts.
In the fashion industry, which today relies heavily on overseas production and long shipping times, many brands have to make key decisions on the allocation of their own products. You may have been expecting 250 little black dresses in size 2, and your amazing salesforce sold them all, but the factory was only able to send you 180 by the time you needed them. What do you do? Do you let the warehouse decide who gets the stock? Or do you review all the orders and carefully determine who gets what?
Momentis takes the guesswork out of this situation by having the system allocate according to management’s predetermined rules. You can use first-in, first out (sales orders), earliest cancel date, customer priority, customer credit status, order category or any of a long list of other criteria to let the system determine who is allocated the first stock that comes in. If required, you can manually override these decisions (if the owner’s brother’s boutique placed a last-minute order).
I’m usually pretty good at making big decisions responsibly, but sometimes I think I would benefit from having Momentis type allocation rules for making smaller, more frequent decisions in life.
ABOUT MOMENTIS
The Momentis Fashion ERP System was developed uniquely for fashion, apparel, footwear and accessory brands, wholesalers and distributors. Momentis automates and streamlines processes from design to delivery – Product Lifecycle Management, Sourcing & Logistics, Inventory Management, Warehouse Management, Order Management and Financials – and integrates seamlessly with leading B2C, 3PL, POS and other 3rd parties using EDI and APIs. Momentis’ Business Intelligence, Alerts and Reports make sure that the right people have the information they need when they need it.