In today’s consumer-driven economy, companies are driven to keep more and more stock keeping units (SKUs) in inventory that differ only slightly in features, add-ons, assortment, packaging, language, or other minor variation. While companies must offer customers the choices they want, the more SKUs that a company maintains, the more cost it incurs for investment in inventory, storage, shipping and obsolescence risk.

Postponement is a useful strategy for managing “SKU creep” while providing the widest assortment of products those customers could possibly want. The concept is simply to stock generic versions of the product near points of major consumption. Final assembly, packing and packaging are postponed until sales estimates develop into more reliable forecasts or actual orders. The customer receives exactly the product he wants and the seller eliminates tremendous amounts of inventory that might never sell at its full price.

Nippon Express USA manages and implements postponement programs for hundreds of customers in every industry from apparel, to office machines, to industrial products with the following resources:

• 62 DCs throughout North America near all major population centers. Each DC is equipped to handle all aspects of postponement
• Skilled people to perform assembly, finishing and packaging
• Information system to take sales order and forecasts and translate them into action plans to transform the generic products into the finished items that customers demand
• A network of DCs capable of handling any product and any type of order, no matter how complex