Per-store case rounding put a supplier order near twice its ceiling

Flow

What the planner does for each product now

Every store still gets a legal amount and the supplier still gets whole cases.

1. 1Empty shelves first⌄

   A store with nothing on the shelf gets its minimum chunk before anyone else.

2. 2Add up, round once⌄

   All the stores' real needs are summed and rounded up to whole cases a single time.

3. 3Hand out chunks⌄

   Small chunks go to the store that still needs the most; a spare piece goes to the fastest seller.

4. 4Left out⌄

   Suppliers that never split cases and packs that cannot be cut evenly keep the old per-store rounding.

The planner I built for the stores put together one supplier order at nearly twice what the owner would spend. Most lines were one product for one store, and each needed only a few units. Each got rounded up to far more than it needed.

Two mistakes

The planner used the wrong smallest amount. It is allowed to give a store half a case of pricier items, but it read a full case from the older engine instead. So every store's minimum was a whole case.

It also rounded each store by itself and added them up after. The supplier ships cases of a product, not one box per store. If several stores each need a few units, one shared case can cover them. Rounding each store up alone buys a lot of extra.

What pooling does

The agent wrote the change. Now each store asks for what it really needs. For each product, the planner:

• gives empty shelves their minimum first,
• adds up all the stores' needs and rounds up to whole cases once,
• hands out the case in small chunks, always to the store that still needs the most, and gives any spare piece to the fastest seller.

Each store still gets a legal amount, and the supplier still gets whole cases, so the checks that approve and send orders didn't change. Suppliers that don't split cases, and packs that can't be cut evenly, keep the old way.

A second change lets an empty shelf split a case at a lower price than usual. The approval checks allow that on every line, because a line doesn't say whether its shelf was empty.

Still over

The whole order came down by about a fifth. It's still over the ceiling, and the cause is still open.