This interface has been designed to allow you to quickly and easily see actionable insights into your current inventory, supplier performance, and potential opportunities to take advantage of AIM.

Let’s take a closer look at what the AIM Insights Dashboard offers:

Filter Controls and Date Range

The AIM Insights Dashboard panels will display results based on your dataset you define using the date range selector and filter controls. Once you have defined a filtered set of products, the ‘Model Selection’ link will load the products into the modelling page.

The ‘Search Product’ function allows you to find a specific product, then open its Product Forecast page using the AIM forecast icon. The forecast will slide over AIM and slide back when closed.

TIP: Filter for a specific warehouse first, then search for a product if you want to easily open a forecast for a product/warehouse combination.

AIM Activity Panel

The first panel on the AIM Insights Dashboard is the AIM Activity Panel. This panel displays the current state of your stock controls, number of forecasts set and the age of your stock controls.

Lead Days: this progress bar displays the proportion of products that currently have supplier lead days set. Click the ‘Finish’ button to load products that are missing these controls.

Stock Limits: this progress bar displays the proportion of products that currently have both min and max stock controls set. Click the ‘Finish’ button to load products that are missing these controls.

Forecasts Set: this progress bar displays the proportion of products that have forecasts. Click the ‘View’ button to open the modelling page filtered to show these products that currently have forecasts. You can then click the AIM icon to open these forecasts.

NOTE: It is expected that a small proportion of important products will have forecasts, while many more will rely on the AIM Modelling function.

Stock control age chart: This chart will segment products by the age of their stock controls. The min/max stock level may need to be recalculated as your rate of demand changes. You can select the segments to load these products into Modelling to review their settings. How often you need to update the stock controls will depend on the growth or decline of the Rate of Demand.

AIM Top Performers Panel

The AIM Top Performers panel will highlight the 100 top Warehouse/Product combinations found within the date range and filters selected.

Use the drop-down menu to base the ranking on either Revenue, Gross Profit or Gross Profit Margin %.

Use the Product Forecast icon to load that warehouse/product combo into Product Forecast and ensure you are managing these top performing products.

NOTE: Blue icons indicate that a forecast does not exist, a Green icon indicates that a forecast does exist and a Red icon indicates that the forecast has run beyond the months previously forecast.

Upcoming Reorder Point Panel

The AIM Upcoming Reorder Point panel indicates what products potentially have a shortfall in their product controls versus their rate of demand. The ranking can be set by the average sales performance (revenue or gross profit), multiplied by the number of days you are projected to be out of stock, or by the quantity required to restore the product back up to the min stock limit (shortfall quantity), or max stock limit (Restore Quantity).

Once again, click the AIM icon to open the Product Forecast and review the expected future demand and the adjust the stock controls to set an appropriate strategy.

Supplier Performance Panel

The Supplier Performance panel will rank the suppliers you have purchased from within the date range and current filter criteria selected. The value of the purchases will display as a stacked bar chart to segment the value that has been purchased that arrived within the lead times of the supplier, and the value that was receipted beyond the lead days of the supplier. Hover over the supplier to see a tooltip that indicates the % of orders that are received late.

Click the suppliers bar to load their products into the modelling page, where you may wish to update the lead days setting according to the ‘actual’ performance.

TIP: Keeping the ‘lead days’ value accurate will help you calculate the correct stock controls for a Just-In-Time strategy and will also set an accurate default ETA on your purchase orders.

AIM Opportunities Panel

The AIM opportunities to improve cashflow panel will calculate an example strategy on products that are currently Understocked or Overstocked. The example Just-in-Time strategy uses actual lead days to calculate stock to cover delivery time with an additional buffer of 7 days of stock to account for delays in placing an order. The maximum stock level is set to an additional 28 days, so replenishment should occur approximately once per month.

Click through to the modelling page where you can set your own strategy and review the changes that would take place if it was implemented.