I sign for it · The sponsor

Safety stock is an insurance premium. Nobody has ever told you the price.

You pay it every day, on every line, in every store, and nobody has ever told you the price or what cover you're getting for it.

Why it survives

Not a big problem anywhere. A small problem everywhere.

A static safety-stock number is a fixed premium against a variable risk. The lines that genuinely need cover do not get enough of it; the lines that do not need it get far too much. You are overpaying and still exposed, at the same time. That is not a tuning problem. It is the wrong shape of answer.

At 2,000 stores and 15,000 SKUs, the waste on any single line is pennies. Nobody would call a meeting about it. No one's KPI owns it, no report surfaces it, and the total never appears on a page.

Until you multiply it.

The arithmetic, textbook only

What share of your range is held at 99% availability when 95% would do?

Safety stock scales with the service-level z-score. Moving a line from 95% to 99% availability adds 41% to its safety stock. Moving it back releases 29%. Standard normal-demand arithmetic, not a RetailPulse output.

So the question is one line: what share of your range is held at 99% when 95% would do, and what is 29% of the safety stock on that share worth to you in cash?

Money released from inventory is the cheapest money in the business, because it is already yours. No lender, no dilution, no board paper.

The curve, and the calculator
The test, not the pitch

You don't have to change anything.

RetailPulse runs alongside what you already have, in your building, and tells you what it would have ordered. It doesn't touch your system. It doesn't place an order. For the first few weeks it just keeps a scorecard against your own decisions.

If it's wrong, the box goes back and you've lost a month. If it's right, you'll know in eight weeks, from your own data, not from my case study.

You're contracted to your current planning vendor, not prohibited from measuring them.

See it on your own data.

Twelve weeks, one category, anonymised by you. A ten-minute job, not a project. Send it Thursday and you'll have the findings the following Wednesday.

  1. 1 · The extract"Twelve weeks, one category, anonymised by you." A ten-minute job, not a project. No NDA drama, no IT ticket, nothing to approve.
  2. 2 · The findings"Here is what it found in your data." The engine has never met a real dataset it did not find something embarrassing in. Evidence about you, not persuasion.
  3. 3 · Run-alongside"Eight weeks. It doesn't touch anything." Zero operational risk; your own scorecard.
  4. 4 · Founding agreement"One of three places." By then you have your own proof, and the scarcity is real.
Send the extract

A personal reply within 24 hours, from Rob, not a sequence.