Industrial Design Solutions
Our capstone team partnered with LeanBox, a local startup, to create an innovative tool that reduce waste using demand analytics to optimize inventory. This project won the 2016 Design Award from Northeastern University.
ABOUT LEANBOX
LeanBox is a Boston-based startup company that provides healthy, affordable food and beverages to workplaces in self-serve kiosks. Due to the short shelf-life of fresh food, and stocking miscalculations, LeanBox was experiencing high waste. My capstone team and I designed an excel tool that forecasted the optimal restocking point for each item based on the past sales of that specific location. Our method showed an average yearly cost savings of 37% in comparison to their current system.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
As LeanBox continues to expand they are challenged with managing a high number of stock keeping units with various shelf lives, supplier schedules and delivery schedules. Customer demand is uncertain and over-stocking perishable products leads to waste, while under-stocking leads to potential lost demand. LeanBox does not have a method to efficiently determine restocking amounts at individual kiosks where demand is highly variable.
DESIGN OBJECTIVE
Our team aimed to create a tool that would help reduce waste by optimizing inventory using past demand data. The final tool designed must incorporate supply chain principles and historical sales data to calculate the optimal inventory stocking level for a specified location. The tool must be created using Microsoft Excel as this is the application currently in use at LeanBox. The tool should also be an intuitive platform that is easy to operate with minimal training required.
DEMAND ANALYSIS
It is imperative that LeanBox understands customer demand at each location to dynamically determine stocking quantities that meet demand while also reducing wasted products. The final model uses discrete demand distributions to quantify demand by location, brand and category. The tool allows the user to display demand over time for each location and product grouping before running the corresponding inventory policy. The demand distribution serves as an input for each inventory policy to calculate the optimal stocking quantities.
INVENTORY TOOL
To ensure that LeanBox can continue to implement their new inventory policies, the team built an Excel-based tool with a user interface to store the product database and to perform all necessary calculations in order to find the optimal restocking order up to level.
SEE TOOL IN ACTION BELOW!
Download Poster Here
Download the full report here.