Thrive Technologies, the leader in inventory optimization technology for wholesale distributors, is proud to announce the launch of Thermostock™. Thrive’s newest patent-pending digital inventory technology prevents the accumulation of dead stock by up to 90 percent, improving inventory turns, increasing profitability, and ultimately freeing up warehouse and branch space—all without requiring an expensive risky software implementation.
Analyzing the data from hundreds of wholesalers over the last few years, Thrive discovered that a staggering 90 percent of the typical wholesaler’s “dead stock” (inventory that hasn’t sold in a year) came from items that were purchased although they had low or no sales activity. Additionally Thrive discovered that between an average of 85 percent of a wholesaler’s items sell 10 or fewer times per year.
“Items that only have three sales in the last year, for example, don’t have enough sales history for a forecasting system to measure or predict future demand accurately which is a primary reason for either lost sales or for unnecessary inventory to be acquired.” said Thrive CEO Rick Morris. “So we had to come up with a better way to help our clients solve this huge unaddressed problem.”
Thermostock works by analyzing millions of sales transactions to identify low volume sales items, looking at characteristics such as recent sales, supplier characteristics, pack sizes, SKU replacements, branch storage capacity, type of customer, sales type, cost, and the ability to return products to a vendor. Those factors are used to calculate the optimal Minimum/Maximum for an item, and send it back to the client’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
Thrive is also building machine learning and artificial intelligence to further improve the recommended inventory levels. Thrive interfaces directly with the existing ERP system which makes the process completely non-disruptive for buyers, who continue to cut purchase orders from their ERP system as usual.
“Dead and obsolete stock is an unresolved issue for almost every company with inventory,” said Morris. “For example, wholesalers’ business models require them to stock tens of thousands of low selling items that only constitute 20 percent of revenues. Since buyers have limited time, they understandably invest their time on the high-volume SKUs that generate significant revenue for their companies. The buyers don’t have time to analyze thousands of low-volume SKUs and existing buying systems are not able to manage these items since they have unpredictable sales. This results in a bad combination of lost sales and purchases of inventory that is not selling. Thermostock optimally and dynamically manages those low-volume items, buying items that are currently selling and not buying items that are not. This increases sales and prevents unjustified inventory purchases which end up becoming dead stock.”
Additional information about Thrive Technologies, including its entire portfolio of proven supply chain technologies, can be found online.
About Thrive Technologies
Thrive Technologies is committed to solving supply chain planning issues for inventory-intensive companies without requiring expensive risky software implementations. Thrive has developed patent-pending technologies that analyze billions of rows of inventory data and have reduced dead stock by 43.5% in 4 months. Thrive’s inventory solutions are live within days, integrate closely with clients’ ERP systems, and provide unprecedented agility in managing unpredictability and change in demand and supply chains.