News

Excess Inventory Wastes Carbon and Energy, Not Just Money

by Andrew Winston

Harvard Business Review

August 8, 2011

Read the article

Perhaps the most powerful lever over inventory levels is predicting how much product customers will want, or what's called "demand planning." I recently delved into this meld of art and science when I spoke at a meeting held by Terra Technology, a relatively new and successful player in the "demand sensing" world (the difference between "sensing" and "planning" is about gathering data as close to real-time as possible and feeding it back up the supply chain quickly).

At the meeting were representatives from many of the world's largest consumer product (CPG) companies. The giants in the field, such as P&G and Unilever, spend a lot of money on demand planning, each employing hundreds of people, many with advanced math degrees...and for good reason: P&G's 2010 total inventory, for example, was valued on the balance sheet at $6.4 billion.

That's a lot of capital tied up in warehouses. It also represents a tremendous amount of environmental footprint "embedded": logic suggests that this inventory stock, since it represents a healthy percentage of our economic output, required a good percentage of our energy and water to produce (so billions of tons of carbon emitted, for example). If we could permanently reduce the amount of product sitting idle, we'd save money, energy, and material.