Week1.6-盈利率/效率指标-库存管理

Profitability/Efficiency Metrics: Inventory Management

我们已经认识了一些最重要的针对企业销售的收入业务指标。现在我们要看一下盈利能力或效率指标，重点关注目前广泛用于衡量企业库存管理效率的指标。并且我们会告诉你如何订到最便宜的酒店房间的秘密。
We’ve already identified some of the most important revenue business metrics, focusing on enterprise sales. Now we’ll look at examples of profitability or efficiency metrics, focusing for now on metrics that are widely used to valuate the efficiency of a company’s inventory management.

为什么我们要关注库存管理？

Why the focus on inventory management?

存货管理是营业公司可以在不降低他们的产品质量的同时，降低支出以及使利润最大化的一个主要方法。
Inventory management is one of the primary ways that operating companies can reduce their costs and maximize profitability without lowering the quality of what they sell in any way.

存货inventory

存货通常是指已完工的等待被购买的商品，通常存放在零售店的货架上，或者在工厂和消费者间的物流仓库里。
Inventory is typically a finished product waiting to be bought, typically sitting on a shelf in a retail store or somewhere between the factory and the customer in a logistics warehouse.

商品被制作和被销售之间的时间越长，生产的效率就越低。库存阶段的时间将蚕食效益。
The more time a product just lies around between being made and being sold, the less efficient for the manufacturer. Time spent in inventory erodes profits.

库存时间需要缩短的的四个主要原因：

Here are the four main reasons that inventory time should be minimized.

负浮动negative float

从烘培咖啡的案例学习中你应该对这个问题很熟悉，一个制造商供货给零售商，通常只有在物品被销售后才能得到报酬。但是他用来制造产品的成本已经产生负浮动需要的运营资金，还牵涉到利息费用。负浮动的周期时间越长，你需要付更多的利息费用。如果一个公司的信用不好并且负浮动意外增加 ，公司可能会在等库存被销售的期间破产。比如服装零售店特别容易因此被迫破产，由于他们店里没有销售的存货引起的资金流问题。
You should be familiar with this problem from the Edgars Roast Coffee case study. A manufacturer supplying a retailer typically will not get paid until the item is sold at retail. But the money it spent to make that product is already gone. This negative float requires working capital which also entails an interest expense. The longer the negative float in terms of time, the more interest you pay. If a company’s credit is not good, and the negative float increases unexpectedly, it could run out of cash waiting for its inventory to sell. For example, retail clothing stores are especially vulnerable to being forced into bankruptcy due to cash flow problems caused by unsold inventory in their stores.

美国三个大零售连锁店Wet Seal, Cache和Simple Fashion都在2015年的前六个月里宣布破产。
In the US, three large retail chains, Wet Seal, Cache, and Simply Fashion, all declared bankruptcy just in the first six months of 2015.

存货的固定成本Fixed costs of storage

每天都需要在取暖、照明、空调上花费，暖气、灯光、空调、租金、保安以及保持一个仓库或者零售店的正常运转的项目上支出费用。产品在货架上的时间越长，分摊给它的贮存费用就越高。
The second reason the fixed cost of storage. It costs money everyday to heat, light, air condition, pay rent on, guard and other ways maintain a warehouse or retail store. The longer a product sits on the shelf, the more the costs of storage that need to be allocated to it.

例如，一个家具的仓库和展示间需要每年100000美金的固定成本。展示间的空间可以完全展出200件奢侈餐桌，而这些桌子的销售均价是1200美元。如果每年的平均库存周转率是一倍，这意味着我们每年会销售200张桌子，我们需要将100000美元分摊到这200张桌子上，即每张桌子需要500美元的贮存费用。如果每年的平均库存周转率是五倍，那么我们只需要分摊给每张桌子100美元的仓储费用，这看上去更加合理。
For example, assume that a furniture warehouse and showroom has fixed costs of $100,000 per year, and it has room to display 200 fully setup luxury dining room tables, and these tables sell for an average price of $1,200. If the average inventory turnover were one time per year, that would mean that we would be selling 200 tables per year and we would need to allocate the $100,000 across those 200 units, or $500 in storage costs to every table. If the average inventory turnout were five times per year, then we would only need to allocate $100 per table, which seems more reasonable.

消耗 Wastage

通常库存物品在库时间越长价值越低，一些库存物品容易遭受完全损耗。如果它们没有被立刻销售价值会降到零，比如新鲜烘焙的面包或者餐厅食物。这些必须要在制作当天销售掉，这些是没有被销售的商品，价值全部损失的极端例子。
On average, inventory items lose value the longer that they are in inventory. Some inventory items are subject to complete wastage. Their value goes to zero if they are not sold immediately. Consider fresh-baked bread or restaurant food that must be sold on the day it is made. Those are extreme examples where every unit of extra inventory not sold is a total loss.

其他库存损耗的例子，包括有保质期的商品，在美国和其他国家很多食品杂货都有一个规定的销售日期，在这个日期之后货物再被销售为非法行为。
Other examples of inventory wastage include any product with an expiration date. In the US and other countries many grocery items have a regulated sell-by date after which they cannot legally be sold.

一个我们几分钟以后会讨论的完全损耗的特例，是旅馆房间和航班座位，如果他们没有在规定的日期里被销售，他们作为库存的价值降为零。
A special case of complete wastage that we will consider separately in a few minutes are hotel rooms and airline seats. If they are not sold by their quote unquote expiration date, their value as inventory goes to zero.

废弃obsolescence

在库时间六个月或更长的物品，现实中没有人会再想进行购买。也许那个产品的生产量超过了全球需求量，或者那个产品被更好的替代了，被废弃了，或者流行趋势变化了。产品在库时间越长，它最终无法卖出而造成全损的风险越大，因此平均库存天数（缩写为库存天数），是一个非常有用的需要跟踪的商业指标。
Items that stay in inventory for six months or more may in reality be items that no one want to buy anymore ever. Maybe production of that item exceeded worldwide demand, or the product has become obsolete and been replaced by something better, or fashions have changed. The longer the item is in inventory, the greater the risk it will ultimately need to be disposed of without a sale for a complete loss. For these reasons, average number of days inventory is held, abbreviated as days inventory, is a very useful business metric to track.

库存天数days inventory

现在没有多少公司愿意公开它们的库存天数数据，然而我会和你们分享一个简易的技巧来估算公开上市公司的库存天数，基于它们年度报告里需要涵盖的数字。
Now not many companies are willing to make their days inventory data public. However, I will share with you a handy trick for estimating days inventory for publicly traded companies, based on numbers that they are required to include in their annual reports.

库存天数估计estimate

Public company annual reports

上市公司的年度报告会包括年末库存的价值和每年销售商品的总成本。

• Inventory on hand at the end of the year
• Total annual cost of goods sold

估算：平均库存天数 = 年末库存 / 每年销售商品总成本 * 365

接下来我们会分析沃尔玛和汇编了非常好的商业指标的网站courtesy of investopedia.com。
So we’ll work an example for Walmart, courtesy of investopedia.com, which is a great website with excellent glossary of business metrics.

2014年一月结束的这个财年里，沃尔玛年报公布了这年底有四千四百九十万美元的存货和三亿五千八百一十万美元已售商品的总成本。
For the fiscal year ended January 2014, the Walmart annual report gave year end inventory of 44.9 billion and annual cost of goods sold 358.1 billion.

这年的沃尔玛的库存周转率就是简单地将44.9除以358.1也就是八分之一，再乘365，结果大概为46天。
Walmart’s estimated days inventory turnover for the year is simply 44.9 divided by 358.1, or one-eighth, times 365, or approximately 46 days.

沃尔玛以平均46天的周期销售它的库存，这个数字还是很惊人的如果你考虑到每个沃尔玛需要贮存的销售速度慢的产品的种类数量，一个沃尔玛商店通常贮存有超过10万个不同的商品单品。库存天数指标很好，但是它没有告诉我们哪些销量巨大的商品的没有在预期时间内被销售和其原因。
Walmart sells all its inventory on average within a 46-day period, which is quite impressive when you consider the number of slow-selling items every Walmart needs to keep on hand. A Walmart store typically has over 100,000 distinct product SKUs on hand. So the days inventory metric is great, but it does not tell us anything about which of our thousands or tens of thousands of items are not selling as quickly as expected and why.

原因可能是这特定的商品是季节性的或者不再流行，或者客户认为商品有缺陷退货，这些都是我们想要立刻知道的动态指标。所有接受大数据文化的公司，这其中包括主要的美国杂货零售连锁店像是沃尔玛，7-11和好市多等，都跟踪单个单品的库存周转率inventory turnaround和库存天数days inventory at the individual product SKU level。它们更深入地根据国家的地理区域，甚至单个销售点分类分析。这是通过跟踪当地营销商再次订购商品的日期和数量以及商品是什么时候送达和上架的，将这个和识别了具体时间和单品的现金收入记录做比较。比如说如果一家位于北卡罗莱纳州的商店每年销售50把雪铲，并且这些销售发生在十二月到次年三月期间，那从四月到十一月保存雪铲库存就不合理。SKU (pronounced “skew”), short for stock keeping unit，最小存货单位。

It could be that particular products are seasonal, are no longer in fashion, or getting returned by customers as defective. These are all dynamic metrics that we want to know immediately. All companies that have embraced big data culture, and this includes the major US retail grocery chains such as Walmart, 7-Eleven, Costco, etc., all track inventory turnaround and days inventory at the individual product SKU level. They further subdivide that analysis by geographic region of the country and even by individual store. This is done by tracking the date and quantity when any item is reordered by local management, and often also when the item is delivered and stocked on the shelf. And that’s compared against cash register sales data the identifies the exact time and SKU for all sales. So for example, if a store in North Carolina sells 50 snow shovels per year, and all those sales are between December and March, it does not make sense for them to hold snow shovel inventory between April and November.

Best Practices

在最理想的现实系统里，每个单品设置有自己的预期库存天数expected days inventory，运用数学模型帮助确定需要给此商品分配多少货架空间，并可以根据地区和季节性因素调整。任何时候实际库存天数和预期不符，都是一个需要注意的警告。
In a best practices system, each product SKU has its own expected days inventory, adjusted for region and seasonal factors using a mathematical model that helps determine how much shelf space should be allocated to it. Any time the actual days inventory can be found to be different than what is expected, that is a warning sign that needs to be looked at.

Empty-handed lost customer metric

另一种情况是货架上的某件商品数量过少，我们没法直接计算有多少潜在客户由于他们想要的东西已经售空就不开心地空手离开。
Another issue is when you have too few of an item on the shelf. We can’t measure directly how many times a potential customer went away unhappy and without buying anything because what they wanted was out of stock.

但是一个很好的估算空手离开的流失客户指标empty-handed lost customer metric的方法，是计算特定单品库存周转天数达到零的次数。
But a good proxy for the empty-handed lost customer metric is a number of times inventory of any particular SKU reached zero.

对于品牌声誉来说，你想要销售的每种商品中每种至少保持一件的库存量的是非常值得的。正如彭博社记者梅根麦克阿德在2013的一篇文章中指出的，沃尔玛曾尝试着缩减它的单品单位数量，但是结果因为客户投诉和销售损失而放弃。一个商品的销售量越大，每次此商品达到零库存的时候的潜在损失就越大。
Having at least one of everything that you might be expected to sell on hand is highly desirable in terms of brand reputation. As Bloomberg reporter Megan McArdle stated in a 2013 article, Walmart has tried to cut the number of SKUs it carries, but ended up having to put them back because it cost them in complaints and sales. The higher the volume of unit sales of a product, the larger the potential lost revenue every time we see a zero level inventory.

每次发现空手走出零售店的潜在客户后，发一份5美元礼券和问是否有一些特定的产品你没有在我们的货架上寻找到的友好的市场调查，是一种极佳的实践。事实上我昨天在我们当地的一个大型全国连锁零售店里观察到，员工现在被训练在收银时问今天有什么没有找到的？每一次我都被怂恿着回答，是的，鸸鹋蛋，希望一些数据分析师决定他们是否应该贮存鸸鹋蛋。
It would be an excellent practice any time a potential customer is observed to walk out of a big box retailer empty-handed to send a friendly marketing researcher after them with a $5 gift certificate in their hand and the question, was there a particular product that you were looking for that we didn’t have on the shelf? In fact, I noticed yesterday that at my local grocery store, which is part of a very large national chain, the staff are now trained to ask at checkout, was there anything you couldn’t find today? I’m tempted to answer, yes, emu eggs, every single time, in hopes that some data analyst will decide that they should stock emu eggs. Try it yourself.