What is ABC Analysis & how it is used in inventory management

Here Category A comprises only 10% of products, B contains 20% items, and C has the maximum number with 70% of products. Stock counting not merely helps you analyze your highly valued items but also helps you to understand how frequently do they need to be replenished. The process of replenishment can also be called reordering, which depends on the category of products, as per their own decided controls. Here, you need to list down all the items in a spreadsheet and calculate the cumulative impact they had on your business.

  • It says that in any group, there are significant few and insignificant many.
  • With just a little effort, however, you can modify ABC analysis to adapt it to the specific conditions within your company.
  • The main idea of this Pareto principle is that most economic productivity comes from only a small part of the economy.
  • Finally, class C items are the least significant and are generally low-cost items with lower demand.

Here, ABC Analysis can play a pivotal role in helping inventory managers set service levels based on categorizing the items. The items in Category C are characterized by their low monetary value but high quantity. These items are typically standardized and do not require intensive management.

#6 Customer service levels

The ABC method helps to determine which goods, services and customers are more profitable and resource efficient and which are uneconomical and cost intensive. Inventory software can help track all the changes in product turnover and sales. With an established set of rules and actions, you can easily use an inventory management system to automatically track and create reports to highlight any key areas of improvement. With the goal of streamlining your inventory management, the classifications of your ABC analysis are best kept simple. It should be easy for your teams to know which products belong to specific classes immediately.

ABC analysis is a method in which inventory is divided into three categories, i.e. The items in the A category have the highest value, B category items are of lower value than A, and C category items have the lowest value. ABC method of inventory control involves a system that controls inventory and is used for materials and throughout the distribution management. The terms “Governance, Risk and Compliance”, known as GRC for short, comprises the three areas that are responsible for internationally operating (often listed) large companies functioning well. GRC includes management and internal cooperation, assessing internal and external risks, and ensuring that all business processes and laws and regulations are in sync.

Besides that, the managers need to continuously keep an eye on pricing, customer demand, and product performance. If one implements the Pareto Principle to ABC Analysis, then A consists of 20% of the total products with almost 80% revenue generation. B regulates approximately 30% of the goods with 15% revenue, while C has the lion’s share controlling almost 50% of the stock but only powering 5% of the total revenue. Hence the stock managers are quite lenient while calculating this category of inventory. Most business organizations regard inventory management as one of the most humongous and daunting tasks. But inventory management is crucial for all business domains such as manufacturing, retail, e-commerce, logistics, and many more.

The sales figures alone can be very misleading when it comes to analyzing your customers. Seeing a customer who makes a purchase once or twice a week for a small amount can certainly goof you up into thinking that they are valuable when they are actually not. Instead of the sales figures, drive your perspective more towards the actionable data. This will enable you to take actual decisions that will boost your revenue. CAs, experts and businesses can get GST ready with Clear GST software & certification course. Our GST Software helps CAs, tax experts & business to manage returns & invoices in an easy manner.

ABC analysis categories

Most of the wholesalers and distributors do not put this into practice and unfortunately, get a large number of working capital tied up in unhealthy inventories and products. The products with the highest revenue generation will remain on the top, whereas the ones with a lower revenue dropdown. There are only ‘vital few’ products that can be the money makers for you, whereas the ‘trivial few’ will drop down in the list. You need to continually keep on monitoring the pricing and the selling performance of the products to make sure that their positions are adequate. While the process of resource allocation is done, category A is highly monitored.

Create Rules for Inventory Classes

ABC Analysis also referred to as ABC Classification, is an integral part of material management. It is an inventory categorization method, which classifies the inventory primarily into three distinct categories based on the revenue generation. ABC inventoryhelps business entrepreneurs and stock owners identify the essential products in the stock and prioritize their management based on the value.

ABC analysis example

Saving more on category A products can bring more profits to your business. Lisa has a business of sweaters, and over time, her business has achieved tremendous https://accounting-services.net/abc-analysis-a-critical-inventory-management-tool/ success. Lisa, in search for varieties and additions to her sweater inventory, has filled in 180 types of sweaters instead of just 50 types.

As a result, you decide to put the majority of your resources (purchasing, marketing, etc.) into the ‘A’ shoes and increasingly less to your ‘B’ and ‘C’ shoes. Segmenting the raw data by sales volume helped you determine this strategy. The table shows that items listed in Category A generate approximately  79% of annual consumption value, B yields 13%, while C generates 8% revenue. Before you begin to analyze, collect some data that is already available through any accounting tool, related to the annual spending. This can include all the ordering costs, carrying costs, etc. if at all, they are readily available. These amount to about 30 percent of the total inventory in a company which accounts for about 15 to 20 percent of annual consumption value.

Calculate the aggregate amount for each product by adding up the annual usage value of that product and all the products that come before it in the list. This will give you a cumulative total of the annual usage value for each product. Once you’ve calculated the annual usage value per product for all your items, rank them in descending order of value.

What Is ABC Analysis in Inventory Management?

Such items could initially seem like outliers from a lower category and be unpredictable. When the demand of such items raises overnight, the value raises with it. This means that the item will have to be moved to a higher category in the ABC system.

Example 2: ABC Analysis in Inventory Management

Every product must pass through four main stages; launch, growth, maturity, and then declination. When a product gains optimum value, it inevitably sinks at a certain point in time. It’s essential to highlight the pivotal features of all the three categories viz—A, B, and C on a separate note. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.