Suggested Order Quantities with Lumi AI

Procurement teams constantly balance demand, inventory levels, and supply risk. Ordering too much ties up capital and storage space, while ordering too little risks stockouts and disruptions. Lumi AI helps procurement leaders calcualte data-driven order quantities through natural language queries.

Watch the Full Walk Through

This guide walks through Lumi’s approach to suggested order quantities, showing how teams can perform inventory analysis to inform replenishment strategies.

What are Suggested Order Quantities?

Suggested order quantities are calculated recommendations for how much of a raw material or item should be ordered to maintain adequate supply. Instead of relying on manual spreadsheets, static reorder points, or rough heuristics, businesses can leverage real-time consumption data and inventory levels to guide replenishment.

Suggested order quantities help teams:

• Prevent stockouts: Ensures that high-demand raw materials are always available.
• Reduce excess inventory: Orders are calibrated to actual consumption, reducing carrying costs.
• Standardize replenishment strategies: Uses consistent logic like weeks-of-supply.

Suggested Order Quantities with Lumi

Lumi makes calculating suggested order quantities straightforward. Here’s how it works step by step:

1. Isolating High-Demand, Low-Supply Materials

The first step is identifying which raw materials are most critical. In this example, Lumi filtered to raw materials in the 70th percentile of demand that also had the lowest weeks of supply. This ensures attention is placed on items that are both high consumption and at risk of shortage.

Lumi generates a report with item numbers, total consumption, current inventory, average usage, and weeks of supply. Procurement teams get a clear understanding of which items require attention. The platform also offers summaries, suggested follow-ups, and the option to save insights for boards or request verification.

2. Generating Suggested Replenishment Quantities

From here, a simple follow-up prompt adds a new column showing replenishment quantities. In this example, Lumi calculated how much stock was needed to bring each item back up to four weeks of supply.

Procurement strategies differ by product and priority. Lumi allows custom rules such as varying replenishment targets by SKU class (e.g., A, B, C items) or by category. These assumptions and calculations are transparent and editable, ensuring alignment with organizational policies. Once the analysis is validated, users can save it to a replenishment board. Boards allow procurement leaders to refresh, customize, and share the same analysis on demand, creating a repeatable process for monitoring stock and order recommendations.

Why Suggested Order Quantities Matter

By automating the calculation of suggested order quantities, businesses can ensure they’re replenishing the right materials at the right time. This reduces procurement firefighting, improves supplier relationships, and helps maintain resilient operations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What data is used to calculate suggested order quantities?

‍Lumi leverages ERP data such as consumption, inventory levels, item categories, and demand history to dynamically generate replenishment suggestions.

Q2: Can the weeks-of-supply target be customized?

‍Yes. While four weeks of supply was used in this example, Lumi allows you to adjust targets by product type, ABC classification, or category-specific rules.

Q3: How does this differ from traditional reorder points?

‍Traditional reorder points are static thresholds. Lumi dynamically adjusts recommendations based on real-time demand and consumption data, making it more responsive to changing business needs.

Q4: Can these analyses be repeated automatically?

‍Yes. Once added to a board, suggested order quantity reports can be refreshed on demand and customized as needed.