The diagnostic
Free, instant, and about one minute of your time: two of the worst kinds of month a business has — buried in stock you end up marking down, or shelves empty while customers walk — are usually the same mistake wearing two costumes. This page shows you whether it’s been happening to you, and when.
Those two months feel like opposites — but they’re usually one oscillation: you order big to catch up, the stock lands just as the rush passes, you’re buried, so you cut orders hard, and then you’re empty when demand returns. Whether that cycle runs in your business depends on three things: how far back you look when you order, how hard you correct, and how much momentum your customers’ demand has.
The method is published, DOI-registered research; you don’t need to read it, but anyone can check it — nothing here runs on our say-so.
Run it
See the demo. Run the demo →
A made-up product line that ran short, was over-ordered, sat, was cut back, and ran short again, so you can see what a result looks like.
See your industry. Real US Census figures for every business of that kind in the country, 1992 to now, through the same arithmetic. A national average is thousands of businesses added together, so it reads calmer than any one of them; a single business is usually more volatile, not less.
These seventeen are the industries the published research was tested on. If yours isn’t here, pick the nearest — the reading is about the shape of ordering against demand, not the product.
Run it on your own history. Run it on your own history →
Opens on a separate page that runs with no analytics of any kind — disconnect from the internet after it loads and it keeps working. Your file is never sent anywhere; there is nowhere for it to go.
Run the demo or pick an industry and the result renders here. To run it on your own numbers, use the button above.
A plain-English explainer: the ketchup bottle, the microphone, and how one spreadsheet becomes your charts — plus what fighting this problem costs across the market, and how we tried to break our own tool before you ever saw it. No math degree needed. Download the paper (PDF) →
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Education, not advice: the diagnostic describes the dynamics of the numbers you give it. It does not tell you what to buy, sell, or predict. This page uses the site’s analytics like any other page; the page where you load your own file uses none.