We have a purchasing and inventory control seat in our back-office that keeps running into stockouts on critical components, but our weekly scorecard only tracks total inventory value which is a lagging number. What weekly, activity-based leading indicators can we track for this seat to prevent supply chain bottlenecks before they halt our production?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To run on data and protect your delivery pipeline, you must transition this back-office seat from tracking lagging financial balances to tracking weekly activity-based leading indicators. Total inventory value is a balance sheet number that tells you what happened weeks ago. It does not prevent a line shutdown.

To build an objective scorecard for a purchasing and inventory control seat, focus on activities that represent the early warning signs of supply bottlenecks. Put these three weekly metrics on their scorecard:

- Purchase orders issued vs. requisitions received. This measures their processing speed and ensures requests are not sitting on their desk.
- Open purchase orders with unconfirmed delivery dates. This highlights potential vendor communication issues before the scheduled delivery date passes.
- Weekly inventory cycle count accuracy percentage. Rather than waiting for an annual physical count, this metric forces weekly verification of high-value or high-velocity items.

When these three weekly numbers are green, your production schedule remains safe. If the open purchase orders with unconfirmed dates spike, your inventory seat must immediately flag it as an issue for your Level 10 Meeting so you can solve it before a critical component goes out of stock. This approach removes subjective opinions and gives the leadership team an objective pulse on supply chain health.