Inventory Management
This buffer stock is held to protect against unexpected demand spikes or supply delays.
What is Safety Stock?
This term refers to the last segment of a delivery journey, from a distribution hub to the final customer destination.
What is Last-Mile Delivery?
This demand pattern shows a consistent upward or downward movement in demand over time.
What is a Trend?
What does KPI stand for?
What is Key Performance Indicator?
This dominant supply chain story of 2025, the reintroduction of broad U.S. import duties, pushed supply chain leaders to respond with inventory stockpiling, dual sourcing, or nearshoring plans.
What are Tariffs?
This inventory metric represents the number of times a company sells and replaces its stock over a period.
What is Inventory Turnover?
This transportation mode accounts for the largest share of domestic freight movement by ton-mile in the United States.
What is Rail?
This term describes a recurring pattern in demand data that repeats at regular intervals, such as higher sales every December.
What is Seasonality?
What does SKU stand for?
What is Stock Keeping Unit?
A prolonged drought reduced water levels to historic lows in this Central American waterway in 2023–2024, forcing canal authorities to cut daily vessel transits and restrict cargo loads.
What is The Panama Canal?
This lean inventory approach aims to receive goods only as they are needed in the production process.
What is Just-in-Time (JIT)?
This shipping company, headquartered in Taiwan, owned the ship that blocked the Suez Canal in 2021.
What is Evergreen Marine Corp.?
This forecasting method calculates the average of a fixed number of past demand periods, giving equal weight to each.
What is a Simple Moving Average?
What does PO stand for in a procurement context?
What is Purchase Order?
Houthi militant attacks in this body of water forced dozens of shipping companies to reroute vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, significantly increasing transit times and freight costs in 2024.
What is The Red Sea?
This phenomenon is where small fluctuations in consumer demand cause progressively larger swings in orders upstream.
What is The Bullwhip Effect?
This document serves as a contract of carriage between a shipper and a carrier and also acts as a receipt for the shipped goods.
What is Bill of Lading (BOL)?
This term describes the portion of customer demand that cannot be met immediately from available stock and must be fulfilled later or lost entirely.
What is Stockout/Lost Demand/Backorder?
What does ERP stand for in a supply chain systems context?
What is Enterprise Resource Planning?
This 2024 IT outage, caused by a faulty software update from a cybersecurity vendor, grounded flights, halted hospital systems, and disrupted supply chains globally — costing Fortune 500 companies an estimated $5 billion in direct losses.
What is the CrowdStrike Outage?
This term, also in a common supply chain formula, refers to the most cost-efficient quantity to order, determined by balancing ordering costs and holding costs.
What is Economic Order Quantity (EOQ)?
This transportation strategy uses a hub terminal where incoming shipments are immediately transferred to outbound vehicles with little or no storage time.
What is Cross-Docking?
This statistical measure calculates the average absolute difference between forecasted and actual demand.
What is Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD)?
What does MRP stand for, referring to the system that calculates material use based on production schedules?
What is Materials Requirements Planning?
In March 2024, a container ship collision destroyed this Baltimore bridge, closing the Port of Baltimore for weeks and disrupting mid-Atlantic auto and coal shipments.
What is the Francis Scott Key Bridge?