Real companies, real inventory, real decisions.

When watching only top products is no longer enough

4Camping works with a very broad outdoor assortment, seasonality, different turnover speeds and suppliers with different availability, lead times and order conditions. In such a portfolio, the hardest part is not issuing the order itself. The hardest part is knowing which items have priority.

Before Forto, preparing an order for one supplier took approximately 8 hours. With hundreds of suppliers and tens of thousands of SKUs, it was not realistic to regularly check the whole portfolio at the same depth. Product managers naturally focused mainly on the best-selling items.

The rest of the assortment hardly got into regular checks. Not because it was unimportant, but because manual analysis at that scale hits the limits of human capacity. The result was stockouts in parts of the portfolio, more difficult pre-orders with suppliers and, at the same time, unnecessarily high stock for some periodically ordered products.

Forto added a decision layer to the process. Above sales, stock, forecast, lead time and open orders, it started to regularly evaluate what to order, why and with what priority. Purchasing no longer had to start from an empty spreadsheet. It could work with a prepared proposal and spend time on exceptions, suppliers and business impact.

The key was not only speed. Unifying the logic mattered just as much. Every product started to be evaluated by the same methodology, so the portfolio stopped depending only on which items happened to be reviewed manually.

The first phase covered about 10,000 SKUs, mainly in the lower manual-priority part of the portfolio. After the impact was verified, the cooperation gradually expanded to more than 50,000 SKUs.

The point is not a faster spreadsheet. The point is that purchasing started to see the whole portfolio through the same logic. Availability improved not by broadly increasing stock, but by making more precise decisions about where stock protects revenue and where it only ties up cashflow.

With a portfolio of tens of thousands of SKUs, a manual purchasing process is not scalable. The real change starts when purchasing no longer deals only with what it can manually review, but works with regular prioritization of the whole portfolio.

A store should not have everything. It should have the right things.

Store distribution is a different problem from central purchasing. It is not only about whether a product is somewhere in stock. It is about whether it should be in a specific store, whether it fits that store type, whether it makes sense to replenish it now and whether it is available in the central warehouse.

At 4Camping, the brick-and-mortar store network was growing, and so were the demands for regular replenishment. The more stores and SKUs a company manages, the faster local manual checks stop being enough. Store managers may know their local operation well, but without a common logic, availability and portfolio composition start to diverge between stores.

Forto extended inventory management with a distribution module. It made it possible to set portfolio templates by store type and continuously evaluate the gap between the required portfolio, current stock and availability in the central warehouse.

The result was not sending the same goods everywhere. Each store could have a different role and a different portfolio mix. What remained common was the methodology for evaluating what is missing, what should be replenished and what should not be pushed to the store.

Operational relief also mattered. Automatic evaluation of replenishment needs reduces manual checking, while still leaving room for business decisions where local knowledge is needed.

In a growing retail network, distribution should not become operational firefighting of branch requests. It should be a managed process that knows what should be where, why and under what conditions it should be replenished.

For a growing store network, it is not enough to monitor stock centrally. It is necessary to manage what should be in each store, why and when it should be replenished.

A full warehouse does not mean the right inventory

Inventory often combines two unpleasant things at once. A company has more money in the warehouse than it would like. At the same time, it is missing products that would sell. At first glance this looks like a contradiction. In reality, it is a common sign of poor inventory structure.

Puravia needed a better view of stockouts, turnover and inventory development. Orders were largely based on people’s experience. Experience matters in purchasing, but it is not enough once the portfolio, inventory value and pressure on availability grow.

Management needed a shared view of where stock protects sales, where a stockout is likely and where the warehouse only ties up capital. Without that, inventory decisions are hard to discuss factually. Each team sees a different piece of reality.

Forto connected stock, sales and stockout views into one decision environment. The company started to better distinguish products that needed to be protected for availability from items where stock was growing beyond a reasonable level.

The important shift was not only in reporting. Inventory stopped being an isolated operational topic for the warehouse and purchasing. It became a regularly monitored management topic with a direct impact on revenue, availability and cash in the company.

Reducing stock while growing is harder than optimizing one number. A blanket inventory reduction can damage availability. A blanket inventory increase worsens cashflow. Strong inventory management is built on the ability to distinguish.

That was the value of Forto. It was not another stock table, but a shared language for management, purchasing and finance: which inventory works for the company and which quietly slows it down.

Strong inventory management does not start with the question of how much stock there is in total. It starts with the question of which inventory helps the company earn money and which only quietly slows it down.

Inventory is not only finished products

In an apparel brand, inventory quickly splits into many layers. Product, size, colour, season, material. Each layer can tie up money. Each can cause a stockout. And each has a different meaning for business decisions.

CityZen dealt with fragmented reporting, limited ability to plan seasonal orders and a missing management view of stock, turnover, stockouts and key indicators over time.

There was also significant overstock of slow-moving items in inventory. This is common in fashion and variant-heavy assortments. Total warehouse value may look like one number, but the real problem appears inside the structure.

Forto created a daily overview of key indicators. It was not reporting for reporting’s sake. The goal was to give management, purchasing and finance a shared view of where capital sits and what that means for the next decisions.

Material was also included in management. For this type of company, that matters because part of the problem may appear before the finished product - in material, variants, planning and future ability to deliver the right product.

Forto helped unify the view of products, material, stock and development over time. The company gained a better basis for seasonal planning and for decisions about where to hold stock and where to gradually reduce it.

Good reporting should not flood a company with numbers. It should show where a decision is being made. In inventory, that is often the place where sales, purchasing, finance and operations meet.

A growing brand needs more than a revenue report. It needs to know where its money sits in inventory, how availability is developing and what individual items mean for seasonal planning.

An Excel forecast breaks when lead time starts to decide

In a broad e-commerce portfolio, it is not enough to know what sells. Purchasing needs to know when goods will run out, when the next delivery will arrive and how far ahead it has to decide.

Růžový slon worked with more than 14,000 SKUs. Forecasting was done manually in XLSX and the team regularly managed to watch mainly top products. But in such a portfolio, the long tail is also commercially important. Not because every item has huge revenue, but because together they create availability, breadth of offer and customer experience.

Another complication was different delivery lead times. Some goods could be replenished relatively quickly. Part of the assortment from Asia had a lead time of more than 6 months. That is a fundamental difference. With a short lead time, some mistakes can be fixed quickly. With a six-month delivery, an ordering mistake appears late and hurts longer.

In this situation, manual forecasting in XLSX stops being only time-consuming. It becomes selective. People naturally watch what they know, what has the highest revenue or what is currently burning. But that does not mean the rest of the portfolio has no impact on revenue, availability or tied capital.

Forto created a daily updated overview of goods to order. Purchasing could therefore work with items according to risk, priority and supplier reality, not only according to what had been manually checked.

The ability to distinguish decision types was important. Some items needed action because of an immediate stockout risk. Others were about availability several months in the future. Both situations may look similar in an order, but they have a completely different impact on inventory management.

Forecast is not the goal. The goal is a purchasing decision the company can trust even when deciding about availability several months ahead.

The longer the lead time and the broader the assortment, the less a manual Excel forecast is enough. Forto helps distinguish where the company must react today and where it is deciding about availability months ahead.

Growth does not automatically have to mean more money in the warehouse

For a young e-shop, inventory management is harder than it may seem. History is short. Marketing can quickly change demand. Suppliers set MOQs. And part of the assortment has expiration dates.

OlaOla faced exactly this combination. It was an early-stage e-commerce brand with strong marketing, an unclear boundary of future growth, high minimum order quantities and orders based largely on estimates.

High MOQs create specific pressure. The company cannot always order exactly the quantity that would match short-term demand. It has to decide in larger batches and accept the risk that some stock will sit longer than is healthy.

For an assortment with expirations, this risk is even more sensitive. Excess stock is not only tied cashflow. It can become a future loss if it is not sold in time. That is why it is not enough to watch only availability. Turnover, portfolio structure and approaching expirations must be managed as well.

Forto started preparing order proposals that considered MOQ, lead time, inventory turnover time and sales development. Management also included a view of expiring items and approaching expirations.

It was important not to order only according to growth. Growth can tempt a company into higher stock. But with expirations and MOQs, a poor decision can create a problem several months later. Forto helped separate stock that supports growth from stock that would eventually start to slow it down.

The result is strong precisely because it does not stand only on revenue growth. Revenue grew by 87%, but inventory value stayed the same. For cashflow, that is a much more important signal than the revenue curve alone.

Fast growth is not a reason to switch caution off. Quite the opposite. The faster a company grows, the more it needs to know which inventory supports growth and which will start slowing it down.