The owner of a 25-person trading company looks at the accountant's report and sees a profit. Then looks at the bank account and sees payroll has to slip a week again. The gap is usually sitting in the warehouse — in the shape of stock that once looked like a good idea.
In Polish trading and manufacturing SMEs we see the same picture over and over: 3–5 months of sales locked up as inventory, and one third of it hasn't moved off the shelf in more than a year. That isn't "supply security". That's frozen cash — plus the shelf rent, the carrying cost, and the risk the item goes out of use before it finds a buyer.
The good news: a small company doesn't need an expensive APS system or a Big Four consultant for this. It needs three things most SMEs already have in their ERP — they just need to start using them.
Start with the split — ABC/XYZ
You can't manage every SKU the same way. In a typical SME warehouse, 15% of items produce 80% of revenue, while 40% of items don't move at all in a year. Sorting them alphabetically in Comarch Optima or Subiekt GT tells you nothing about which ones matter.
ABC analysis splits items by sales value: A — the top 80% of revenue (usually 10–20% of SKUs), B — the next 15%, C — the rest. XYZ analysis splits them by demand predictability: X — stable, sells evenly, Y — seasonal or trending, Z — sporadic and unpredictable. Overlay them and you get nine classes.
In practice, it's a report you can put together in Excel from an ERP export in one afternoon. You don't even need BI. You need a pivot table and a coefficient-of-variation formula.
- AX (expensive, stable) — hold little, reorder often, watch it like a hawk.
- CZ (cheap, chaotic) — buy in larger batches once every six months so you don't waste time on tiny orders.
- AZ (expensive, chaotic) — this is your biggest headache; needs judgment calls, not automation.
Min/max and safety stock — no guessing
Once you know what's AX and what's CZ, you can set sensible min/max levels for each. The field has been in every ERP for 15 years and almost nobody fills it in — because "nobody knows what to type".
You fill it in like this: min = demand during lead time + safety stock. If the supplier delivers in 7 days and you sell 20 units a week on average, you need at least 20 to cover lead time plus a buffer. The buffer depends on the XYZ class — for X, 20–30% of demand is enough; for Z, it may be 100%. Max = min + economic order quantity (how much it pays to order at once, given transport cost and volume discounts).
Once this is dialled in, the ERP tells you what to order and how much. Instead of "thinking about what's missing", the buyer reviews a report and clicks. An hour a week instead of half a day.
The dead-stock report — the easiest win
Before you optimise what to buy, it's worth selling or writing off what won't sell. The "no-move" report is one filter: show everything that hasn't left the shelf in 12 months. In most SMEs the first run shocks the owner — it turns out 300–800k PLN is asleep on the shelves, and nobody remembered.
What you do with it. Part goes back to the supplier under a credit note (if it's still new). Part sells at 50–70% off to end customers. Part gets scrapped as a write-off. You rarely recover 100% — but even 40% recovery on 500k of sleeper stock is 200k of cash back on the account.
At one of our clients — a 24-person plumbing-parts wholesaler from southern Poland — stock at the end of 2024 was 1.8m PLN, of which 720k (40%) had been sitting for more than a year. After eight months of ABC/XYZ work, min/max in Comarch Optima, and a weekly "no-move" report, stock dropped to 1.3m PLN and the stock-out rate (lost sales) went down over the same period, not up. The owner recovered about 350k in cash and stopped drawing a working-capital loan at each quarter-end.
Where to start
You don't have to roll it all out at once. The sequence that works in 15–50-person companies:
- Week 1 — export the full item master from ERP and 12 months of sales into Excel. ABC/XYZ classification. Report how much cash is sitting in class CZ and in "no-move".
- Week 2 — owner and head of purchasing decide what to do with dead stock. Clearances, discounts, supplier returns, write-offs. Deadline: 60–90 days.
- Week 3–4 — set min/max in the ERP for class A (top 20% of SKUs). The rest comes later.
- Month 2–3 — a regular weekly review of suggested-purchase-order reports instead of improvising.
- Month 4+ — only now is it worth talking about higher-tier tools (demand forecasting, supplier integration, EDI).
The biggest obstacle isn't the tooling — that's already in the ERP. The biggest obstacle is that nobody in the company has this clearly on their plate. If the head of purchasing also handles quoting, complaints and drivers, stock gets managed whenever there's time. And stock doesn't "manage itself" — it rots on its own if nobody manages it.
If you want to see how much cash is sitting in your warehouse and where to start — the first conversation is free and takes half an hour. You typically walk away with a concrete list of 3–5 things to do in the first month, whether or not you end up working with us.
Stock isn't "supply security". Stock is cash somebody turned into cardboard boxes and put under a shelf — hoping someone will buy them back one day.