01 · The problem
What problem does it solve?
Picture a distributor supplying a few hundred retailers from three godowns. Stock lives in a spreadsheet per godown, updated at night. The owner decides what to buy from memory and phone calls.
The result is the classic squeeze: best-sellers run out mid-week while slow items sit for months, holding cash that could have bought the fast movers.
Lost sales
Retailers buy elsewhere when a best-seller is out.
Locked cash
Money sits in stock nobody is ordering.
Hours of reconciling
Three spreadsheets never quite agree.
Gut-feel buying
No single answer to “what should we buy today?”