🪙
Money sleeping on shelves
Millions of pounds of working capital is locked in inventory you'll never sell at full margin. Meanwhile your fastest movers stock out three Fridays a month — and nobody knows the £ damage until the quarter closes.
🛡️ Inventory Intelligence Built for Operators
Stop guessing what to order. Start knowing.
Optimal Chain makes 18 forecasting methods compete for every product you sell — the best one wins, and you see the proof. Then it goes further than any tool we've found in this bracket: it stress-tests your purchase orders against price rises and supplier delays, and tells you exactly how to spend your replenishment budget — down to the penny, across thousands of products, instantly.
0
Forecast models per SKU
0
SKUs tested on live data
0
To re-plan an entire budget
Days
To go live — not months
SEE IT RUN
Watch it find £1.8 million in 3 minutes
A real wholesale catalogue — thousands of products (demo data). Forecasts, budget allocation, a supplier shock and a negotiation break-even, end to end. No voiceover fluff, just the engine.
Want the deep dive? Watch the full 14-minute tour — every engine, chapter by chapter →
The Problem
The £-million leak in your warehouse
Inventory teams are stuck in a doom loop: capital locked in stock you can't sell, while your fastest movers stock out three Fridays a month. Here's why.
📉
A formula from 1965
Your safety stock is calculated by Z × σ × √L — a textbook formula that assumes demand is a perfect bell curve. Yours isn't. It never was. Christmas products look "erratic". Slow movers get classified as "obsolete". Decisions get made on bad maths.
⏳
Three days in a spreadsheet
Every PO cycle, your team rebuilds the same model in Excel. By the time it's signed off, the supplier prices have already changed. Enterprise platforms cost £250K and take 18 months. Existing inventory tools use the same broken formulas you already have.
Optimal Chain fixes all of this. World-class inventory intelligence, deployed in days, not months — for businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets and refuse to spend a quarter-million on an enterprise platform.
The Optimal Chain Difference
From messy data to boardroom decisions in three steps
01
Connect your data
Guided CSV/Excel upload from any ERP, WMS or accounting system. We onboard you personally. White-glove setup. Days, not months. We learn your bespoke field names, warehouse codes, and supplier hierarchies — you don't.
02
Run a blueprint
In minutes, every SKU is forecast by an AI tournament, classified, projected day-by-day for the next year, and given a stocking policy. Three policies plus your own custom one are computed simultaneously — switch between them in under a second.
03
Make decisions
Drag a budget slider. Stress-test a port closure. Negotiate a supplier deal with break-even pricing to four decimal places. Export adjusted POs straight to your ERP — fully audited, ready to sign off before Friday's board meeting.
The Capabilities
Twelve capabilities. Six that change the game.
A forecast on its own doesn't order stock, free up cash, or win a supplier negotiation. This is the difference between knowing your numbers and acting on them.
🎯
The Forecast Tournament
18 forecasting methods compete for every product. The best one wins.
Your products don't all behave the same way — some sell steadily, some are seasonal, some sell twice a year in big lumps. So instead of forcing one formula onto everything, Optimal Chain tests 18 different forecasting methods against each product's own history — each one is shown only the past and asked to predict months that already happened, so there's real proof of which method works. The winners are then combined: the method best at spotting trend handles trend, the best at seasonality handles seasonality, and so on.
Then the AI layer goes to work. While every other method studies one product at a time, the AI reads your entire catalogue at once — every product, every month, side by side. It spots things no single-product view can see: the 40 lines that always surge together in spring, the new product tracking the launch curve of an older one, the quiet mover that behaves exactly like your bestseller did two years ago. It uses that catalogue-wide knowledge to sharpen each individual forecast — and it has to earn its influence in the same blind testing as everything else.
- Every method blind-tested against your own sales history — proof, not opinion
- Specialist methods for steady, seasonal, and rarely-selling products
- An AI layer that learns from your whole catalogue at once — not one product at a time
- Seasonal products classified correctly — not mislabelled "erratic" like older tools do
- Open any product and see exactly which methods competed, which won, and why
Forecast contest · SKU-A12 · lower = more accurate
🥇Trend specialist0.71
🥈Trend + smoothing0.78
🥉AI layer (whole catalogue)0.83
•Sparse-demand specialist0.91
•Steady-demand baseline0.94
•Seasonal specialist1.02
•+11 more···
Blended forecast composition
Level Trend Seasonal AI
🛡️
The Disruption Planner
For the moments every supply-chain manager dreads.
A price-increase letter lands on Monday. The port strikes on Tuesday. Oil jumps on Wednesday. Friday is the board meeting. The Disruption Planner replaces a week of spreadsheet panic with a 60-second decision tool. Stress-test against supplier delays, cost surcharges, or both stacked together — at portfolio, supplier, or SKU level.
- ⏱️ Lead-time delays + 💷 cost surcharges, stacked additively
- 🌐 Portfolio-wide · 🏢 Supplier-specific · 📦 Individual SKU
- Smart starters: oil cascade, Suez closure, combo shock
- Live £-impact counter — four numbers update as you type
- Per-supplier negotiation hit-list (fight hardest with #1)
- One-click apply & export adjusted POs to your ERP
Disruption Planner · Combo shock
⚡ +5% portfolio ⏱️ +10d global 🌪️ Combo +7d / +5%
Extra cost
£127,420
SKUs affected
412
Stockout risk
87
PO inflation
+8.2%
BlueChip Components£42,100
Northland Forge Ltd£28,940
Pacific Source Co.£19,720
+ 14 more suppliers£36,660
💷
PO Budget Allocator
"I have £750K. What should I order?" — answered in milliseconds, every time.
Type a budget. The engine recalculates the optimal purchase order across every supplier and every SKU in your catalogue, in under 5 milliseconds. Drag the slider — watch projected service level move live. Drag the service-level slider — watch the budget cost recalculate. Bidirectional, pre-computed at 80 points, zero server round-trips.
Under the bonnet, the engine works the way a very good buyer would — just across thousands of products at once. It works out which products would hurt most if they ran out (how much revenue is at risk, how exposed the stock position is, how important the product is) and funds those first. It respects every supplier's minimum order quantity — so every suggested order is one you can actually place, not a theoretical "order 137 units" when the supplier's minimum is 500. And it makes sure small-but-vital products with chunky minimums don't get squeezed out by the big lines. Every pound of budget goes where it protects the most revenue.
- Entire-portfolio OR per-supplier scope — one click switches the engine between "all my suppliers at once" and "just BlueChip's POs". Same maths, different lens.
- "Next Best Move" recommendation — the single highest-value unfunded SKU shown with cost, urgency score, lead time, days of cover and annual revenue. Tells your buyer what to do next.
- Per-supplier drill-down modals — click any supplier card and see every SKU's urgency, fill rate, allocation phase, stockout exposure days, and £ at risk.
- 3-phase smart allocation — every SKU is classified Emergency (lead-time cover only), Safety Stock, or Full — so you can see the protection level of each line, not just the £.
- MOQ Impact Analysis — side-by-side "with MOQs vs without MOQs" comparison and budget waterfall showing exactly how much MOQ overhead is costing you and which suppliers to renegotiate.
- Live KPI dashboard — Allocated, SKUs Ordered, Compliance, Revenue Protected, Suppliers Funded — all updating as you drag.
- Type shorthand — "750K", "1.2M" — for the buyer who's done this a thousand times.
- CSV export per supplier — ranked by urgency, ready for the ERP, ready for sign-off before Friday's board meeting.
This is the single most operationally valuable feature in the platform. Procurement teams stop rebuilding the same spreadsheet model every PO cycle and start making informed £-anchored decisions in seconds.
PO Budget Allocator · live
£750,000
SKUs funded
3,847 / 4,210
Service level
87% → 96.4%
Revenue protected
92.1%
Suppliers funded
42 / 47
⚡ Next best move
SKU-K448 · BlueChip Components · £18,420 · 9 days cover
📐
Safety Stock Based on Reality
Sized by how your products actually behave — not a 1960s formula.
Nearly every tool on the market sizes your buffer stock with a textbook formula that assumes demand follows a neat bell curve. Real demand doesn't — it's lumpy, seasonal, and unpredictable in ways the formula can't see. Optimal Chain does something more honest: it measures how far off its own forecasts were on each of your products, then replays thousands of realistic scenarios from those actual misses to work out exactly how much buffer covers you — say, 97 times out of 100. The buffer fits the product, instead of the product being forced to fit a formula.
- Built from each product's real forecast track record — not an assumption
- Works for any demand pattern — steady, seasonal, lumpy, or barely-moving
- Buffers grow before your busy season and shrink after it — releasing cash automatically
- A built-in floor stops buffers collapsing on products about to pick back up
How often — and how big — the forecast misses were
Enough buffer to cover 95 out of 100 outcomes — no more, no less
💰
The Deal Analyser
"They're offering 8% off if we take 5,000 units. Should we?"
The Unified Deal Optimiser models up to 8 pricing tiers simultaneously, computes break-even prices to 4 decimal places, runs an optimal-quantity search per tier, and shows you a visual savings waterfall. Includes the Queue Effect — the carrying cost of stock waiting in line behind your existing pile, which most businesses miss entirely and which can entirely erase a 10% discount.
- 1–8 tier analysis in a single click
- Optimal quantity search per price point — save more than the supplier offered
- Break-even pricing to 4 decimal places — your exact walk-away number
- Queue effect modelled (most platforms ignore this entirely)
- Plain-English AI narrative ready for the boardroom
Supplier deal check · 5 offers compared
Offer 3 5,000 units £8.42 +£14,210
Offer 4 10,000 units £8.10 +£11,840
Offer 2 2,500 units £8.75 +£6,920
Offer 5 25,000 units £7.85 -£8,420
Break-even at MOQ
£8.6184
£0.1984 room to negotiate
📊
Customer & Supplier Intelligence
Not basic tables. Two interactive command centres.
The Customer Hub is a 10-section command centre with BCG-style strategic quadrants (Stars / Emerging / Anchor / Review), 12-month lifecycle heatmaps, AI-powered customer stockout risk scoring, and forward revenue projections. The Supplier Hub is a 12-section analytical powerhouse with 5-axis radar scorecards, HHI concentration analysis, 90-day stockout-risk timelines, and a £-quantified action board where every recommendation has an exact pound value attached.
- BCG-style customer quadrants: Stars · Emerging · Anchor · Review
- 12-month lifecycle heatmap with per-customer normalisation
- 5-axis supplier radar: Service · Balance · Forecastability · Lead Time · Strategic Value
- HHI concentration analysis with treemap visualisation
- £-quantified action board: Free Up Capital · Negotiate Savings · Protect & Grow
- Cross-tab navigation — click a customer, drill to a SKU, in one journey
Supplier · BlueChip Components A-
£42K saveable / yr
17 SKUs · 3 critical
And there's more
Six headline capabilities. Six more behind them.
⚖️
4 Stocking Policies, Side By Side
3 ready-to-go policies — Cost Saver, Balanced, High Availability — computed simultaneously in a single analysis run. Plus a fully custom 4th policy where you set the service-level target for every one of the 9 ABC/XYZ segments, persisted between sessions. All four run through the exact same mathematical pipeline. Switch between tabs in under a second. Plus per-SKU service-level overrides for the handful of SKUs you can never afford to stock out on, regardless of policy.
🔬
Products Graded by What Matters
Every product graded on two things: how much money it drives, and how predictable it really is. Seasonal products get graded correctly — most tools mislabel them "erratic" just because the sales pattern moves.
📈
365-Day Projections
Day-by-day forward simulation with thresholds that change with the seasonal forecast — not flat averages.
📦
MOQ Intelligence
Identifies where minimum order quantities are forcing 12+ months of stock. Hands you the negotiation data.
🧪
Live What-If Simulation
From any SKU's deep-dive modal, change lead time, unit cost, MOQ, stock quantity, or service level (50%–99.9%) — the entire pipeline re-runs live. Safety stock, reorder point, ROQ, target level, days of cover and order-now quantity all recalculate in front of you. Always simulated from the original pre-optimisation snapshot — no compounding errors. Apply permanently to write the change through to all four policy tabs and the financial aggregates, or revert to original with one click. Customised SKUs are flagged across every view.
🦀
Rust-Accelerated
Forecasting kernels written in Rust. 30×–200× faster than pure Python. 10,000-SKU catalogue runs in minutes.
How It Compares
The honest pitch.
Spreadsheets break the moment your catalogue grows. Off-the-shelf tools use textbook formulas from the 1980s. Enterprise platforms cost £250K+ and take 18 months. We built Optimal Chain because none of those options actually solve the problem an inventory team faces every Monday morning.
| Capability | Spreadsheets | Netstock / EazyStock / Slim4 | Blue Yonder / o9 | Optimal Chain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forecast models per SKU | 1 | 2–4 proprietary | 5–10 | 18 + AI, blended |
| Safety stock method | Textbook formula | Textbook formula | Mixed | Sized from real forecast track record |
| Predictability grading | Past sales wobble | Past sales wobble | Past sales wobble | Actual forecastability |
| Disruption stress-testing | None | Basic | Yes | Cost + delay, 3-tier, live counter |
| PO Budget Allocator | Manual guesswork | Basic ranking | Yes | Budget-first, MOQ-aware, instant |
| Deal analysis | Manual | Manual | Yes | 8-tier optimal-quantity + break-even |
| Catalogue size | 200–500 | 5K–25K | Unlimited | Any catalogue size |
| Time to deploy | n/a | 6–12 weeks | 12–18 months | Days — we set you up |
| Annual cost | Free + hidden | £15K–£40K | £250K+ | From £199/month — full price list published, no per-seat fees |
Optimal Chain
- 18 methods + AI compete for every product
- Buffer stock from real track record — not a formula
- Graded by true predictability — seasonal ≠ erratic
- Supplier-shock stress test with live £ impact
- Budget-first ordering — MOQ-aware, instant
- Deal analyser with exact walk-away price
- Any catalogue size — tested at 50,000 SKUs
- Days to deploy
- From £199/month — full price list published
Under the bonnet
How it actually works
The short version of the engineering — in plain English. (If you have a data team, they're welcome to grill us on the detail.)
01
18 Methods, Blind-Tested
Every product's history is split into "past" and "recent". All 18 forecasting methods — trend, seasonal, sparse-demand and steady-demand specialists, plus a machine-learning layer — predict the recent months using only the past, and get scored on how close they came. Real proof on your real data.
02
Winners Combined
Most platforms pick one winning method per product. We take the best specialist in each area — trend, seasonality, baseline level, and how likely the product is to sell at all — and combine them into one forecast built specifically for that product.
03
Buffer Stock From Track Record
The engine keeps a record of how far off its forecasts were for each product, then replays thousands of realistic scenarios from those misses to size the buffer that covers your chosen service level. No bell-curve assumption, no one-size-fits-all formula.
04
Rust-Accelerated
Forecasting kernels written in Rust. 30×–200× faster than pure Python. A 10,000-SKU catalogue completes in minutes — and the budget allocator runs entirely client-side at <5ms.
Who It's For
Built for businesses like yours
Any size. Real warehouses. Real suppliers. Real cash-flow pressure. If your inventory is a board-level conversation, you're our customer.
🏭
Distribution & Wholesale
5,000+ SKUs, hundreds of suppliers, MOQ headaches, port-strike exposure, customer-mix complexity. We turn your replenishment cycle from a three-day spreadsheet exercise into a five-minute decision.
⚙️
Manufacturing
Long lead times, raw-material price shocks, multi-tier suppliers, bill-of-materials ripple effects. Stress-test the next price-increase letter before it lands. Know the £ damage of every supplier delay before the meeting.
🛒
Multi-Channel & E-commerce
Customer-concentration risk, seasonal lifecycle products, fast-moving SKU mix, multi-warehouse complexity. Forecast-error-driven XYZ classification finally gets your seasonal range right.
Deliverables
What you actually get
💷
Headline £ Improvement
The single working-capital number you give your CFO. Net of required investment. Auditable line by line.
📦
Per-SKU Recommendations
Order Now Quantity, ROP, ROQ, Target Level, projected stockout date — for every SKU, on every policy.
🏢
Supplier Hit-List
£-impact-ranked negotiation board. Know exactly who's costing you the most before the next contract review.
📊
4 Stocking Policies + Per-SKU Overrides
Cost Saver, Balanced, High Availability — computed simultaneously — plus a fully custom 4th policy where you set every segment's service level. Sub-second tab switching. Per-SKU overrides for the strategic ones.
📥
ERP-Ready Exports
Adjusted PO CSVs ready to import straight back into your ERP. Boardroom-ready PDF reports your MD will actually read. Premium multi-sheet Excel deliverables.
🧠
Forecasting Intelligence
Per-SKU Forecast DNA explaining exactly why the AI made every decision. Tournament leaderboard. ML transparency built in.
✨ Full Price List · Setup Free · No Per-Seat Fees
Simple pricing, published in full.
Most tools in this market make you fill in a form to find out what they cost. Here is our entire price list. Every plan includes everything — all capabilities, concierge onboarding, bespoke data mapping, and support. The price depends on one thing only: how many products you stock.
| Plan | Catalogue size | Monthly | Annual (save ~15%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Blueprint | Any size | £0 | Full-catalogue diagnosis on your own data — see what's wrong and what it's costing you, free |
| Starter | Up to 500 products | £199 | £1,990/yr |
| Growth | Up to 2,000 products | £399 | £3,990/yr |
| Professional | Up to 5,000 products | £699 | £6,990/yr |
| Enterprise | Up to 20,000 products | £1,499 | £14,990/yr |
| Enterprise Plus | Up to 50,000 products | £2,499 | £24,990/yr |
| Custom | 50,000+ products | Quoted individually — talk to us | |
- ✓ Setup is free on every plan — white-glove onboarding, guided CSV/Excel from any system, bespoke field mapping, first blueprint validated with you
- ✓ Every capability on every plan — forecasting, buffer stock, budget planner, disruption planner, deal analyser
- ✓ No per-seat fees — your whole team is included
- ✓ 7-day free trial — set up by us on your own data, no card required
- ✓ Start free: send us a sales export and see your own catalogue diagnosed before paying anything
For context: a business stocking 2,000 products typically holds £1m+ in inventory, with holding costs commonly estimated at 15–25% a year. See the full pricing page for the detail and FAQs.
FAQ
Questions you're probably asking
How long does it take to get up and running?
For most customers, we go from "kick-off call" to "first validated blueprint" in 5–10 working days. The pace depends on your ERP and the cleanliness of your data. We do the heavy lifting — schema discovery, field mapping, edge-case handling — so your team can stay focused on the day job.
Do I need a specific ERP to use this?
No. If your ERP, WMS or accounting package can export a spreadsheet, Optimal Chain can optimise your inventory — guided CSV/Excel exports from any system: SAP, NetSuite, Sage, custom systems, anything. We help you build the export the first time. After that it's a button click.
What size business is this for?
Honestly: any inventory-holding business. We deliberately built Optimal Chain so the maths scales — a 200-SKU independent retailer gets the same forecast tournament and reality-based buffer stock as a 50,000-SKU national distributor. There is no SKU cap, no minimum, no "you're too small" gate.
That said, customers see the biggest £ ROI when inventory is already a board-level conversation — typically when working capital tied up in stock, MOQ pressure, or supplier risk is one of the top three things the management team worries about. If a 10–25% working-capital release would meaningfully change your year, this platform pays for itself many times over.
Is my data secure?
Yes. Data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest. UK-region hosting on Microsoft Azure. Your data is never used to train cross-customer models — your blueprint is yours. GDPR compliant. Full audit logs available on request. We can sign your DPA on day one.
How does this compare to Netstock, EazyStock or Slim4?
Honestly: we like those tools, but they do things the traditional way. They test a handful of forecasting methods per product; we test 18 and show you the scores. They size buffer stock with a textbook formula that assumes demand is smooth and predictable; we size it from each product's real forecast track record. They label seasonal products "erratic" because the sales wobble; we grade products on whether they can actually be predicted — and seasonal products usually can. And we haven't found another tool in this bracket that plans purchase orders from your budget, stress-tests supplier delays with a live £ figure, or hands you an exact walk-away price for supplier negotiations. See the comparison table above for the full breakdown.
What if my data is messy?
It always is. That's why we onboard you personally. We have a Data Quality Dashboard that grades your data on coverage, missing fields, outliers, and date continuity — with plain-English impact statements ("47 SKUs have no sales history; these will use a fallback method with low confidence"). We tell you exactly what to fix and what we can work around.
Can I try it before paying?
Yes — and on your own data, not a demo. Send us a sales export from any system and we'll come back with a free, full-catalogue blueprint: a forecast for every product, every risk flagged, and the £ figure sitting in dead and excess stock. No card, no sales calls. If you like what the diagnosis shows, we'll set you up with a 7-day free trial — the full platform loaded with your own products, set up by us, no card required. Carry on after that and plans start at £199/month — the full price list is published — with setup free on every plan.
What does it cost?
From £199/month for catalogues up to 500 products, up to £2,499/month for 50,000 products — the price depends only on how many products you stock. Every capability is on every plan, setup is free, there are no per-seat fees, and annual billing saves about 15%. The whole price list is published here — no quote forms, no sales calls.
How do I get in touch?
Email contact@optimalchain.co.uk — every enquiry is read and responded to personally, normally within one working day. Tell us about your business, your ERP, and the inventory problems you're trying to solve, and we'll come back with a live blueprint on a similar business's data. No salespeople. No PowerPoint. Just a real conversation.
Your next stockout is already in the post.
Let's stop it.
Tell us about your business and your inventory headaches, and we'll come back — normally within one working day — with a live blueprint on a similar business's data.
Prefer email? contact@optimalchain.co.uk