The wholesale inventory problem, honestly stated
Wholesale and distribution margins live and die on stock decisions. Too little of a best-seller and your biggest customer rings a competitor. Too much of a slow line and this year's profit is parked on a shelf, at 15–25% a year in holding costs. Most businesses we talk to manage this in Excel, or with an ERP reorder module that applies the same crude formula to a £200,000-a-year product and a £200-a-year one.
The symptoms are always the same:
- Stockouts on the lines that matter — discovered when the picker reaches an empty bay, not three weeks earlier when the order should have gone in.
- Cash buried in dead and slow stock — often 20–30% more inventory than the sales actually justify.
- Purchasing by gut feel — a buyer, a spreadsheet, and supplier MOQs that force round-number guesses.
- No answer to "what if?" — a supplier adds two weeks to lead times and nobody can say what it costs until it already has.
What Optimal Chain does about it
A real forecast for every product — with the proof attached
Upload a sales export and every product gets its own 12-month demand forecast. Eighteen forecasting methods compete for each product, blind-tested against that product's own history, and you can open any line and see the scores and why the winner won. When your FD asks "why are we ordering 4,000 of these?", there's an answer on screen.
Buffer stock sized from reality, not a textbook
The standard safety stock formula assumes demand follows a smooth bell curve. Wholesale demand doesn't — it spikes when a big customer orders and goes quiet in between. Optimal Chain measures how wrong its own forecasts actually were for each product and sizes the buffer from thousands of resamples of those real misses. Best-sellers get the protection their behaviour demands; boring stable lines stop hoarding cash.
Give it your budget — it writes the order plan
This is the part purchasing teams don't believe until they see it. Tell the platform what you can spend this month — "£250k" — and it plans the purchase orders to the penny: the most urgent revenue protected first, every supplier's MOQ respected, per-supplier drill-down included. Change the budget and the plan re-solves in milliseconds. We haven't found another tool in this bracket that plans from the budget backwards.
Stress-test supplier delays before they happen
"+10 days on all Far East suppliers" — what does it cost you? Optimal Chain answers in about a minute, in pounds, with the adjusted purchase orders to cover it. And when a supplier offers "8% off if you take 5,000 units", the deal analyser tells you whether it's a good deal with holding costs included — plus the break-even price to take into the negotiation.
Built for how wholesalers actually run
| Your systems | Works from spreadsheet exports of any system — Sage, Unleashed, Cin7, Katana, a legacy ERP, or plain Excel. Bespoke integration is part of onboarding, included in the subscription. |
|---|---|
| Your catalogue size | Validated on a real 50,000-line SKU catalogue from an established company. Typical customers run 500–50,000 products. |
| Your suppliers | MOQs, lead times and per-supplier constraints are first-class citizens — every recommendation is one you can actually place. |
| Your warehouses | Multi-warehouse support, with data quality checks that flag duplicates, gaps and anomalies in plain English before they can distort a number. |
| Your team | Built for 1–5 person purchasing teams. No per-seat fees, no analyst required — the reasoning behind every number is on screen. |
Frequently asked questions
Does it work with my ERP or accounting system?
Yes. If your system can export a CSV or Excel file, we can work with it and build the first export with you. Unleashed users can connect directly, with no spreadsheet or column mapping, and return funded recommendations as Parked purchase orders.
How long until we see results?
Send us a sales export and we'll come back with a live dashboard built from your own data, typically within days. No multi-week integration project, no workshops — the onboarding is done for you.
We're happy with Excel. Why change?
Excel got you here, and we won't pretend otherwise. But past roughly a thousand products, no spreadsheet can forecast each line, size its buffer from its real behaviour, and fit purchase orders to a budget across dozens of suppliers with MOQs. That's not a discipline problem — it's a maths problem, and it's the one we automated.
What does it cost?
From £199/month — and the full price list is published. The price depends only on how many products you stock, with no per-seat fees and setup free on every plan. And before you pay anything, the free blueprint shows you the diagnosis on your own data.