Distribution
Which stock is slow-moving?
Slow stock quietly ties up cash and warehouse space until someone runs a manual ageing report. FactSmith compares current stock position against actual sales demand by product and location, and ranks what is moving slowest relative to what is on the shelf.
Why this matters
Stock sitting idle costs money and space, and is usually only caught at stocktake or when cash gets tight -- well after the point where clearing it would have been cheap.
What data is needed
Inventory position plus sales or movement history, by product and by warehouse or depot.
The evaluation copy runs against PostgreSQL. SQL Server is on the adapter path for a customer warehouse; that path is not what the package proves end to end today.
How the analysis works
A turn or velocity measure is computed per product per location, flagging items with high stock relative to recent demand. Results are grouped by category so a genuinely seasonal item is not confused with dead stock.
What can go wrong
New products with no sales history yet can look slow by default. A product deliberately overstocked ahead of a known promotion needs a human to say so -- which is what vouching a fact is for.
Example
A distributor with several depots asks which lines have more than three months of stock on hand against their trailing sales rate. Ask returns them ranked by rand value tied up, split by depot.
How FactSmith approaches it
Ask is what is available now. Easy Data -- turning messy sources into that dimensional foundation -- is in early development.
FactSmith calls this the Fact Layer: a data integration (ETL) step, a knowledge base, and a business ontology, working together underneath the answer. On screen it stays simple -- ask a question, get a trusted answer -- with the layer-by-layer detail available to anyone who wants to see how the answer was built.
Permissions are enforced beneath the AI, not by it -- see Trust and security.
Related questions
Declining customers · Margin leakage · For distributors · How it works