The inventory and delivery frequency matrices determine the optimal parameters for each cluster and subsequently for the articles that are assigned to these clusters. The materials manager locally triggers the calculation for the articles and optimizes the respective inventory levels and delivery frequencies with the focus of achieving a total cost minimum. Since optimizing the delivery frequency directly influences the required safety stock level this step is performed prior to the safety stock calculation.

4flow turn computes the actual situation for each article of the respective materials manager. This implies that criteria determined within the inventory and delivery frequency matrix are either computed based upon transactional data or imported from other IT-systems.

4flow turn automatically optimizes the parameter for each article. Afterwards 4flow turn displays only those articles where parameters have changed compared to the current setting in the systems.

After the calculation the customer-specific workflow for approving and importing the optimized parameters can be initiated. This step allows the materials manager to manually adjust parameters or to block selective articles from further re-calculation for a specified period of time. Likewise an approval-concept similar to the four-eye principle can be chosen.

In order to guarantee and monitor the cost savings and service level improvements, 4flow turn provides a specific control functionality.

Back to the 4flow turn overview.

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