Monday, the count
At an apparel brand with a studio, a small warehouse and stock at a fulfillment partner, Monday morning is for counting. The online store says there are 41 navy tees in medium. The spreadsheet says 38. The partner’s portal says 44, and none of them has heard about the twelve that went to the pop-up on Saturday.
By noon the numbers agree, more or less. By two o’clock a container from Portugal is delayed, and somebody has to decide whether to reorder the fabric now or wait. That decision depends on how fast the navy tees sell, which depends on whether the stock figure from this morning is right.
Nobody in operations complains about hard work. What wears people down is doing the same reconciliation every week and still not being sure.
What goes wrong
Inventory problems almost never start in the warehouse. They start where the numbers are copied.
- Three places, three figures. Each channel and each warehouse keeps its own count, and they drift apart by the hour.
- Reordering by feel. Somebody notices the shelf is low. By then the lead time has already passed.
- Freight lands nowhere. The $1,800 shipping and duty bill goes into overheads, and the unit cost of the goods it carried stays wrong all year.
- Receiving is a guess. A delivery arrives short, or with damaged units, and the difference is fixed later, if at all.
What changes in Keelvy
One grid for every place
Read every product and material against every warehouse, shelf and cell in one grid. Filter it, export it, correct a quantity in place. Shopify, Faire and your storefront sell from that same figure.
The date you have to order by
For each material Keelvy shows the day it hits its minimum, the day it runs out, the date you have to order by, given the supplier’s lead time, and how much to order. A scenario can draft the purchase orders for you to check.
Purchase orders with the supplier’s own prices
Keep each supplier’s quoted price, minimum order and lead time against the item. A new order fills them in; you change what you need and send it.
Landed cost on the goods
Spread freight, customs duty, broker fees and insurance over the goods they came with. The unit cost is the real one, and so is the margin.
Receiving that tells the truth
Book a delivery in full or in parts, with batch numbers, best-before dates and the units that arrived damaged. Damaged units wait in a queue for you to return, scrap or accept.
Counts on the phone, partners in the loop
Walk a shelf with a phone camera, scan codes and post the corrections with the value of the difference. Connect ShipBob or Extensiv, and a warehouse that holds your goods packs and ships your orders while the stock stays in Keelvy.
Example: a container of fabric
An order of 600 m of organic jersey arrives from Portugal: $5,400 for the fabric, $1,120 of freight and $390 of duty.
- The warehouse receives 580 m in good condition and 20 m with a dye fault, which goes to the defects queue.
- The operations lead spreads the freight and duty over the delivery. The jersey’s cost moves from $9.00 to $11.52 a meter.
- Every tee made from it carries the new cost from its next production order. The margin report shows the change in the same month.
- The supplier agrees to credit the faulty 20 m. A return claim records it, and the credit comes off what is owed.
The result. The cost of the next 600 tees is right from the first one, and nobody has to remember the dye fault in March.
What Keelvy does not do
- It does not drive robots or replace a warehouse system built for a hundred pickers. It is made for brands that run their own shelves, with a partner warehouse or two.
- It does not forecast demand with a black box. The reorder plan is built from your minimums, your lead times and what is already promised, so you can see why it says what it says.
- It does not send stock to Amazon’s warehouses; Amazon is not a connected channel yet.
