When should I shop?

- What kind of shopper are you? Do you wait until you're almost out of something and then go shopping? Or do you buy things every week when you go to the store? Well for supply chain folks, these are actually different replenishment policies. In some cases, we wait until the inventory reaches a certain level, and that's called our reorder point. That triggers us to place a replenishment order and to go and buy more. In other cases, we schedule deliveries to occur every week or every month on a regular period. In other words, we have a periodic replenishment policy. So for the things in your life and in your supply chain, if they're expensive or if the consumption is kind of hard to predict and changes over time, a really good strategy is to use the reorder point policy. Wait until you're almost out and use that to trigger a new order. For things that you use all the time where the consumption is pretty regular, you can just…