Reading the Inventory Calendar and Matrix in EDGEBIC

The inventory calendar reads one product deep and the inventory matrix reads the whole catalog wide, and together they answer two different planning questions: how is this product doing, and which products need attention. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, the calendar shows every projection column for a single product across time, while the matrix shows one row per product and one column per date, each cell colored by status. Knowing which view to reach for, and how to read its lenses and KPI strips, turns a wall of numbers into a fast decision.

This post is a reading guide to both views. It sits under the EDGEBIC planning guide and builds on reading a projected available balance row by row.

The calendar: one product, full detail

The calendar is the single-product cockpit. Pick a product, a bucket width (a day, a week, or a 28-day period), and a bucket count, and it lays out the full projection: opening, scheduled receipts, forecast demand, firm demand, gross requirements, projected available balance, the below-safety flag, discrete and cumulative available-to-promise, and the suggested order quantity. It is where you go to understand exactly why a product's stock does what it does.

Above the rows sits a KPI strip with four headline numbers:

• Current on-hand: the authoritative ledger sum for the product.
• Days of cover: on-hand divided by the average daily demand rate across the horizon.
• Projected stockout: the first bucket where the projected balance drops below safety stock.
• Below safety and suggested: how many buckets fall below safety, and the total suggested quantity.

The strip is a health read; the rows are the diagnosis. When days of cover is low or a projected stockout date is near, the rows show the arithmetic behind it. The projected available balance explainer covers that arithmetic in full.

The matrix: the whole catalog at a glance

The matrix is the wide view. Every active stocked product is a row, every date bucket is a column, and each cell is colored by status. It is built for triage: one screen tells you which of three hundred products are healthy, which are below safety, and where demand is clustering.

The matrix has its own aggregate KPI strip: total on-hand across all products, the count of products below safety, the total suggested quantity, and the product count. Those four numbers are a plant-wide inventory pulse before you narrow to any single product.

Lenses: one grid, many metrics

The matrix's power is the lens. A lens changes what each cell shows without re-querying, so you can look at the catalog through one metric, then another, instantly:

Switching lenses re-colors the already-loaded data, so a scan of on-hand health, then of the promise position, then of where replenishment is suggested, is three clicks over the same rows. To pull fresh numbers after posting a movement, you refresh, which re-reads the projection.

A worked scan: find this week's shortfalls across 300 SKUs

Suppose you run a catalog of 300 stocked products and want the ones about to run short this week.

Step 1, triage on the matrix. Set the on-hand lens and a one-week window. The below-safety cells light up across the whole catalog in one screen. The KPI strip says, for example, eleven products below safety and a total suggested quantity of 4,200 units. You now know the size of the problem without opening a single product.

Step 2, drill into the tight cells. Double-click a below-safety cell. Its full breakdown opens for that product and date: opening, scheduled receipts, forecast and firm demand, gross requirements, projected balance, both ATP figures, and the suggested quantity. The color becomes a cause: a red on-hand cell might be real committed demand, or it might be an overdue build-to-stock order clamped into today inflating the receipts figure.

Step 3, diagnose on the calendar. For the handful of genuinely tight products, switch to the calendar and read the rows. The projected stockout date and days of cover on the KPI strip tell you how urgent each one is, and the row detail tells you whether to firm a replenishment or move a due date. Reading the inventory KPI strip takes those four headline numbers one at a time.

The matrix triaged the catalog; the drill-down explained each cell; the calendar diagnosed the individual product. That is the intended reading flow: wide to narrow, color to cause.

Reading overdue supply correctly

One habit avoids a common misread. Overdue open supply, a build-to-stock order whose completion date has slipped into the past, is clamped into today's bucket so it stays visible. So today's on-hand or receipts figure can look surprisingly large when it is really the sum of several overdue orders piled forward. If a current-bucket receipt looks bigger than any single order you expected, drill in and check the order list; the view is surfacing a late backlog as supply you can chase, not inventing stock. This is the same clamping behavior described in how a stockout shows up before it happens.

For a planner, the two views divide the work cleanly. The matrix is where you start your day: scan the catalog, count the problems, spot the clusters. The calendar is where you solve one: read the rows, size the suggestion, decide the action. Between them they turn inventory planning from a spreadsheet crawl into a look-and-act loop, the same efficiency that good inventory management for manufacturers and disciplined safety stock practice depend on.

See the calendar and matrix on your own catalog in the EDGEBIC platform overview, or contact US for a demo.