For ops + procurement

"Sarah remembers" is not a reorder strategy.

In most growing e-commerce businesses, replenishment lives in one person's head. They walk the warehouse, eyeball the shelves, glance at last week's sales, and call the supplier. It works — until they go on leave, leave the company, or the catalogue gets too big to hold in working memory. Then the stockouts start, the panic-orders follow, and the cash flow shape gets ugly.

What "Sarah remembers" actually risks.

Stockouts on bestsellersThe thing customers actually want is sold out for the four days between "Sarah noticed" and "supplier delivers."
Cost: lost sales + a customer who tried a competitor and might not come back.
Panic orders at higher prices"We need it fast" means air freight instead of sea, or a smaller-quantity unit price instead of bulk.
Cost: margin shaved every reactive cycle.
Overstocking what doesn't moveTo avoid the next stockout panic, Sarah orders extra of everything — including the slow movers.
Cost: working capital tied up; warehouse fills with the wrong stuff.
Sarah goes on leaveThe reorder process freezes. The team guesses. Mistakes get made in both directions.
Cost: two weeks of operational fragility every time someone takes time off.
Sarah leavesThe institutional knowledge of "this supplier needs three weeks lead time, that one ships in five days, this product is seasonal, that one trends with school holidays" walks out the door.
Cost: six to twelve months for a replacement to rebuild the same instincts.

What ERPNext's reorder rules give you.

Per-item reorder thresholds. Set a "warehouse reorder level" (the trip wire) and a "reorder qty" (how much to order when it triggers). When stock-on-hand drops below the trip wire, ERPNext auto-creates a Material Request — review-and-approve, no manual chasing of the spreadsheet.

Lead-time aware safety stock. Each Item has a lead_time_days. Combine that with average daily sales to set the reorder level at the right place — high enough that a delivery lands before you stock out, low enough that you're not warehousing months of cover.

Supplier-aware reordering. Per-item default supplier and supplier-specific MOQ + price breaks. ERPNext routes the auto-created Material Request to the right Purchase Order workflow.

Replenishment dashboard. One screen, all items below reorder level, sorted by stockout risk. The CFO can ask "what's about to run out?" and get a real answer in seconds — not a phone call to Sarah.

Item: Bath salt jar 200g · lead time 14 days · daily sales avg 8
↑ Reorder at 112 units
0 (stockout) 320 (target)
Reorder level = 14 days × 8/day = 112 units. The system auto-raises a Material Request when on-hand crosses that line. Sarah goes on leave; the order still gets placed; the supplier still ships; the shelves still fill. The procurement engine doesn't depend on the procurement person.

Replenishment is the most automatable part of operations and it's where most growing businesses still rely on memory. Get this right and your CFO sleeps better, your customers find what they came for, and Sarah gets to take a holiday.

Other ways your tooling is showing the strain

/wms
When you've outgrown Shopify + Xero
Six diagnostic tells your storefront and accounting package have hit the inventory ceiling.
/wms/manufacturing
You're a small manufacturer in disguise
Bundles, kits, subscription packs, repackaging — light manufacturing your tools deny.
/wms/cost-per-unit
What does this actually cost?
Landed cost, freight allocation, and the margin question your CFO can't answer in under an hour.
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More on the ScanMan stack.

Replenishment automation is one piece of what a real WMS gives you. Read on at scanman.co — the full WMS picture, the open-source robotics positioning, and where it's all going.

Back to scanman.co →