Improve Days of Supply: Inventory Financing

Turkish subtitles. This course connects product management with a financial view of inventory.

Most inventory programmes treat overstock as a supply-chain puzzle. This course treats it as what it really is—a cash problem. Every extra day of stock is money frozen on your balance sheet, costing you 20–30% per year whether it sells or not.

You will learn why inventory is frozen cash and how a single metric—Days of Inventory (DIO)—links finance language to the levers planners pull every week. You will calculate exactly how much cash a DIO reduction releases (in our worked example, cutting 31 days frees €6.3M with no extra sales).

Then comes the core skill: never look at the total alone. You will break DIO across four axes—channel, time, category, and age—and build a heat map that exposes the exact cell trapping your cash.

You will study the costly mistakes that build overstock in the first place—from managing the average, to delaying markdowns, to hiding forecast error inside healthy-looking totals—and how to avoid them.

Who is this for?

• Retail planners and buyers managing seasonal inventory
• Finance and operations leaders who need a shared language with planning
• Category managers responsible for stock health and cash release

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Translate inventory days into cash impact
• Segment overstock by channel, month, and category
• Build a practical 90-day stock reduction plan
• Present inventory actions in language finance teams understand