What are the most effective ways to keep your inventory stocked with popular items?

I would not limit the Sales Data Analysis to a simple ABC analysis to categorize inventory items based on their importance and sales velocity, where normally to ensure popular items are always available, the focus are the "A" items (high-value, high-demand). But indeed I would expand this analysis to a ABC/XYZ analysis (where XYZ is about the variations on consumption of this item along the a timeline). Doing so, it will be possible to understand, what “A” items have a more stable consumption (AX) while others have different seasonality (AZ), driving different policies for Safety stocks cushions and work with suppliers for different SLAs.

Those are ideals however I would add that looking at supplier challengers are important, therefore fostering mutual beneficial relationship helps in an ever changing and challenging global landscape amd letting them keep you up to date with developments of especially negative perspective.

Start with a simple ABC/XYZ analysis. If you business has above average data integrity and reporting you should consider reviewing Economic Order Quantity across your portfolio to see where improvements can be made. Look for areas to reduce lead time or increase yields in production. You can also consider a pull or produce wheel strategy vs push (forecasting).

There are seasonal aspects which influences this greatly and also what type of content or influencer strategies you provide. This in turn ties in with good timing to recoup cash flow spent returns or ROE.

If the question is to ensure you can continue to meet customer needs even during unforeseen circumstances (specially for popular items), the safety stock must be well calculated and understood, where safety stock levels for popular items need to take in account variations in demand and in the delays in supply. Whatever method is used (JIT, ROP), Safety Stock will work together with it to ensure you do run into Stock-outs

To reduce human error requires continuous refresher training, and ensuring that staff are aware of company objectives and how the lack of systemic execution negatively affects the bottom line.

Make your customer your priority followed by your supplier engagement through consistent communication and work hard on providing useful feedback in sharing relevant information which influences inventory readiness that remains the quality standards.

Agreed, also look at advancement in technology or simply studying your competitors analogy where possible. To continuously improve is standard, the question is do you deploy more resources to maintain stock levels or what are your benchmarks for inventory write offs in the business.

Continuous Improvement is a must when talking about Stock Management, with regular review and optimization of your inventory management processes. Look for areas where you can reduce lead times, reduce variation on lead time gaps, improve forecasting accuracy (using AFV for example) and enhance overall efficiency to keep popular items consistently stocked.

I agree with the examples the best way being that you check the sales reports but it’s also a good thing to ask your staff their opinion on what sells. It’s also worth seeing when you are selling items as u may only sell these products at certain times of the week and not in others.

One challenge when trying to keep a good quality stock level of popular items, it to deal with fails on stock-outs reports, as sales data will only give us what has been sold, but not the real demand from clients that found an empty shelf and went somewhere else for the item, but there are strategies you can employ to minimize their impact, such as the ones used on supermarkets when during the check-out the attendant asks if something was missing from your purchase today ( and have the discipline to register it), or with a car parts supplier, that also register when you have a failure in supply a customer, due to the stock-out. That will help to improve the demand figures and improve forecast accuracy