Excess & Slow-Moving Stock Identifier: Stop Reordering Dead Inventory

The problem this kills

Your reorder process is very good at one thing: keeping the shelf full. The trouble is it doesn't know the difference between a fast mover and a part you haven't touched in two years. So every cycle it dutifully tops up items that already have eighteen months of cover, and the cash that should be funding the things you actually sell sits frozen on a rack in the back.

Nobody set out to hoard. It happens quietly. A product gets discontinued but the reorder rule never gets switched off. A one-time project leaves a pile of leftover parts. Demand drops and the max level never gets revisited. Each one is small. Added up, it's a warehouse full of money you can't spend, plus the slow drip of obsolescence as that stock ages out, gets damaged, or goes out of spec.

Spotting it manually means cross-referencing an on-hand report against a usage report against the reorder rules in your ERP — across thousands of SKUs — which is exactly the kind of tedious, error-prone work that never gets done. So the dead stock stays, and the buyer keeps reordering it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web app for your planning and buying team. You import your on-hand stock and its value, your usage history, and your max / target levels and reorder rules. The tool does the cross-referencing for you: for every item it computes months-of-cover (how long current stock lasts at recent usage), no-movement days (how long since it last moved), and excess-over-max (how far above your max level it sits). It estimates the cash tied up in each excess item and flags anything carrying obsolescence risk.

Then it does the thing your spreadsheet can't: it ranks the whole list by the dollars frozen and specifically flags items that are both sitting in excess and still on an active reorder rule — the ones quietly reordering themselves into a deeper hole. A planner works down the ranked list, reviews each flagged item, and sets a disposition: stop reordering, return to supplier, redeploy to another location, mark down, or write off. Only after the planner approves does the tool draft the reorder-suppression note or the return request. Nothing touches your system of record on its own.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how your reorder process works today and who runs it, what ERP or spreadsheets hold your stock and usage, the exact column names and SKU conventions in your exports, how you'd define "slow-moving" for your goods, your typical and peak item counts, your approval rules, and the messy exceptions (seasonal items, spare parts you keep on purpose, multi-location stock, units-of-measure mismatches). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything — so the thresholds and the math fit your inventory, not a generic template.

From there it walks the agent through the data model, the stock/usage/max import with duplicate guards, the months-of-cover and no-movement engine, the cash-tied-up ranking, the planner review and disposition screen, the human-approval gate, and the draft return / reorder-suppression output. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that uses Google Sheet / CSV imports as the data source and produces a clean CSV export in the exact columns your ERP expects — so you can build and run the whole thing this afternoon, with no integration to your system of record.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

Telling a buyer to stop reordering or sending a return to a supplier are real actions with real money behind them, so the controls aren't optional. The plan builds in login so only your team can use it, row-level security so each org only ever sees its own inventory, a complete audit trail of who flagged what and who approved which disposition, a hard human-approval gate so no return request or reorder-suppression is drafted until a planner reviews the item and signs off, and duplicate guards (one excess record per SKU per run) so re-importing can't double-count or double-action the same part.

Who it's for

Inventory planners, buyers, materials managers, and ops leads whose reorder process keeps topping up dead stock while working capital sits on the shelf. If you can export an on-hand report and a usage report and explain what "too much" means for your goods, you can build this — and put numbers behind the excess instead of a gut feeling.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll have your excess list ranked by frozen cash before the afternoon's out.