In today’s intricate global economy, a responsive and efficient supply chain is indispensable for business success. Inventory Capital Solutions (ICS) by FDC is a comprehensive, integrated advanced planning system engineered to transform inventory management from a stagnant, reactionary task into a dynamic, strategic business function. By integrating powerful analytics, advanced automation, and sophisticated predictive modeling, ICS empowers organizations to fully optimize their stock, significantly lower costs, and dramatically boost service quality.
Let’s explore the pivotal, game-changing features that distinguish ICS in the marketplace.
Integrated Planning: A Unified Source of Truth
Inventory Capital Solutions provides a seamless environment to centralize and enhance all aspects of your supply and demand planning. This capability forms the crucial foundation for aligning your substantial inventory investments directly with overarching organizational goals. The platform enables you to:
Generate High-Precision Stock Plans: ICS automatically develops highly accurate, multi-variant inventory plans that strategically incorporate a wide spectrum of parameters, including custom stocking rules, item-specific constraints, risk profiles, and valuable supplier incentive schemes.
System-Wide Optimization: Planning is optimized holistically across your entire operational network, considering every item and location to provide clear visibility into daily labor requirements, necessary parts routing, and transfer workflows.
Establish Effective Sales and Operations Planning: By delivering superior planning intelligence, ICS actively supports a robust sales and operations planning process, ensuring all departments—from sales to operations—are working from a single, consistent set of numbers. This eliminates organizational friction and costly inefficiencies like stockouts and unnecessary excess inventory.
Automated Forecasting: Mapping the Future
Accurate, reliable forecasting is the definitive key to proactive management. Inventory Capital Solutions provides automated, continuously self-adjusting forecasts to ensure you consistently meet and exceed your service level objectives.
Granular and Aggregate Insight: Forecasts are generated at both the most granular level (individual stock keeping units, or SKUs) at specific locations and the macro-level (providing a top-down view of the balance sheet impact).
Best-Fit Algorithm Selection: IPS automatically tests and selects the single most reliable forecasting algorithm from a pool of options using a multi-algorithm tournament method, ensuring maximum accuracy with minimal user intervention.
Future Events Planning: Easily enhance forecasts by inputting known future demand (e.g., major rebuilds or sales promotions) through the ICS Events Planning application. These events are instantly factored into the demand forecast, and replenishment recommendations are immediately adjusted, ensuring preparedness without creating needless stock buildup.
Future Cash Visibility: ICS projects expected sales, purchase requirements, and inventory positions, along with the resulting cash commitments, for up to 24 months, providing vital cross-functional financial clarity.
Simulations: Risk-Free Strategic Modeling
Making critical strategic decisions requires a clear understanding of their potential real-world impact. ICS provides a powerful, dedicated simulation platform allowing you to test complex alternative strategies in a completely risk-free environment.
Model Business Outcomes: Effortlessly model various policy changes or strategic choices and instantly view their potential impact on key metrics such as financial performance, total inventory value, and customer service levels.
Accelerated Decisions: By supplying concrete data on the consequences of different scenarios, ICS drastically accelerates decision-making and eliminates the inherent risk associated with experimenting on a live system.
Multi-Echelon Optimization: Breaking Down Silos
Inventory Capital Solutions’ multi-echelon inventory optimization (MEIO) capability delivers a comprehensive, holistic view of your entire inventory network, effectively dismantling internal borders and silos.
Network-Wide Planning: ICS intelligently considers all locations across your network and can integrate with multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, enabling complete planning across legal entities, geographic borders, and various currencies.
Optimal Allocation: ICS guides you toward achieving the most optimal allocation of stock across the entire network, guaranteeing maximum return on your capital investments and securing superior service at all customer-facing points.
Third-Party Financing Enablement: Unlocking Working Capital
One of Inventory Capital Solutions' most innovative features is its ability to facilitate third-party inventory financing, transforming capital structure.
Off-Balance Sheet Opportunity: The built-in risk algorithms in ICS enable a solution where investment-grade inventory can be acquired and held by a dedicated Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV). This effectively removes the inventory from your balance sheet, in compliance with major accounting standards (e.g., US GAAP and IFRS).
Risk Mitigation: The financing solution offers a “no-recourse” and “bankruptcy remote” structure, meaning your core business is not financially responsible for the divested inventory.
Seamless Management: ICS efficiently manages both the divested and remaining inventory within a single system, ensuring a seamless, continuous flow of goods without requiring any disruptive changes to your physical warehouse setup or workflow.
Inventory Capital Solutions provides a comprehensive suite of integrated features that fundamentally elevate inventory management to a true strategic function. From accurate planning and predictive forecasting to risk-free simulation and innovative financing, ICS delivers the tools necessary to optimize your inventory, improve your financial health, and secure a decisive competitive advantage in any market.