Based on insights from Astrid Hussonnois (Director of Customer Success, LeanDNA) and Ricky Benning (Senior Customer Success Manager, LeanDNA)
Most manufacturers know they are carrying too much inventory, which directly impacts their inventory costs and overall supply chain efficiency. The harder question is: what does it actually take to reduce excess inventory and optimize inventory control effectively?
The answer is not just better inventory management software for manufacturing or supply chain management software. It is not a target number handed down from the CFO. And it is definitely not telling your buyers and procurement teams to work harder.
It takes a dedicated team, a structured process, and the right inventory solution designed specifically for sustainable inventory reduction and improving business operations. That is what an Inventory Attack Team (IAT) can deliver, helping manufacturers reduce inventory costs while maintaining real-time visibility across multiple manufacturing sites and distribution centers.
What Is an Inventory Attack Team?
An Inventory Attack Team is a dedicated, cross-functional team tasked with accelerating the completion of inventory reduction actions in APEX by LeanDNA. This can scale from one manufacturing location to a complex web of manufacturing, distribution, and data entities.
Every day, APEX generates prioritized Inventory Actions for buyers - recommendations for reducing excess inventory through purchase order management adjustments, cancellations, splits, and min/max level changes.
In the standard workflow, buyers work through their top actions individually. The Inventory Attack Team approach structures the operating model: it wraps leadership accountability, structured meetings, defined roles, and a continuous feedback loop around that daily execution work, enabling better inventory tracking and inventory planning across the entire supply chain.
Executing on inventory reduction actions alone can generate quick wins. But quick wins are isolated, and isolation does not scale. The consistent, lasting results come from wrapping those actions in structure and accountability, with formalized processes and KPIs that ladder into one another across levels of the organization. That is what separates a team running Inventory Actions from a team running an Inventory Attack Team.
Why Inventory Problems Are Never Just Inventory Problems
Before talking about how the process works, it is worth addressing the common misdiagnosis: inventory problems are rarely just inventory problems.
High on-hand inventory does not appear out of nowhere. The root causes are almost always upstream: poor demand signals, long-term procurement contracts that traded flexibility for price, supplier capacity constraints that limit your ability to reschedule, or planning decisions that no longer reflect current reality.
One pattern that comes up repeatedly is buyers caught between two conflicting priorities: keeping production lines running and reducing excess inventory. Without a system that can weigh all the relevant parameters and data to surface the right recommendations, buyers are left making judgment calls under pressure, often defaulting to the safest decision available in the moment. The end result of this is a bullwhip or whipsaw effect that sends poor demand signals to immediate and tertiary suppliers. You end up with shortages for critical components while drowning in excess for items you do not need.
That is where the right inventory management software for manufacturing makes a real difference, by taking the guesswork out of prioritization and helping buyers focus on the actions that serve both goals.
This is why the Inventory Attack Team works at the organizational level, not just the execution level. It creates space for teams to analyze root causes across sites and functions, escalate problems and constraints, and change the underlying conditions rather than just manage symptoms.
The supply chain management tools and inventory management software for manufacturing your team uses will only speed up the process as much as the organizational environment allows.
The Structure: Roles, Cadence, and Accountability
The Inventory Attack Team has a defined structure that distinguishes it from ad hoc improvement efforts. Here is how it is organized.
Key Roles
The team typically includes five or six players:
- Business Unit Materials or Supply Chain Leader — Holds ultimate accountability for results. Sets targets and ensures corporate-level goals translate into site-level action, aligning with broader business growth and warehouse management strategies.
- IAT Team Leader — Orchestrates the process day-to-day. Runs weekly meetings, monitors progress, and pushes inventory management software for actions through to completion, ensuring data points are leveraged effectively.
- Site Supply Chain Leaders — Own execution at the site level. Review escalations and keep buyers unblocked, facilitating smooth order replenishment.
- Buyers — Execute inventory reduction actions daily in APEX. Comment, escalate, and status their top actions, managing inflow inventory and addressing obsolete items to reduce lost sales.
- ERP Data Subject Matter Expert — Addresses master data issues that surface as a result of the process (lead time adjustments, MOQ changes, demand cleanup), ensuring seamless integration with ERP systems.
- Supply Chain Analyst (Advanced Inventory Attack Team) — If you are struggling to execute supply chain processes, the supply chain analyst acts as a consultant to dive deeper to find root causes. If your organization is more advanced, then review patterns in Inventory Actions that are marked as “Unable to Fix” and use those signals to feed back into APEX’s Inventory Optimization capability.
As the process matures, supply chain analysts also play an important role, particularly in reviewing patterns in actions that buyers are unable to fix, and feeding those signals back into APEX's Inventory Optimization parameters.
Meeting Cadence
Structure matters. Without it, the process stalls within weeks.
- Daily (Buyers): Each buyer works their top 3-5 inventory reduction actions in APEX. The goal is not to clear the queue but to make consistent, documented progress on the highest-impact actions.
- Weekly (Full Team): A Monday kickoff to review progress from the prior week, set the goal for the coming week, and surface any escalations. This meeting is short (30 minutes) and focused on aligning business needs with inventory reduction goals.
- Weekly (Per Site): Site leaders review escalations that buyers were unable to fix, assess whether they can be resolved, and identify patterns worth addressing upstream, ensuring optimal inventory management and production readiness.
The Four Phases of Running an Inventory Attack Team
Running an effective Inventory Attack Team follows four phases.
1. Preparation
Before the team kicks off, ensure your APEX configuration is set up to reflect your team’s processes and priorities. Company-level and site-level settings for Inventory Actions in APEX govern how inventory reduction opportunities are valued, how many actions are opened per day, and how to categorize escalations that are unable to be fixed. These settings shape the quality of recommendations your buyers see. These settings will evolve as the team works through its first cycles, so building in a regular feedback loop to review and refine them ensures the recommendations stay tailored to your business needs over time.
2. Kickoff
Once the team is assembled, the Inventory Attack Team Leader facilitates a kickoff session that communicates roles and responsibilities, sets corporate and site-level goals, and establishes the meeting cadence. Goals should be grounded in what APEX shows as achievable.
Leadership participation throughout the IAT cycle is one of the strongest predictors of success. When leaders are actively involved, not just informed, it elevates the work being done at every level and significantly increases the likelihood of hitting the goals the team set out to achieve.. The teams that succeed are the ones where leaders make clear: this matters, we will work through the hard problems together, and progress will be recognized.
3. Execution
Daily execution is the engine. Buyers work their prioritized actions in the APEX Buyer Workbench, updating status, completing what they can in the ERP, and escalating what they cannot. The notes buyers leave are not just documentation, but the institutional memory of the process. They eliminate the back-and-forth email chains and give leadership the context needed to act quickly when an escalation comes in.
Marking an inventory reduction action as "Unable to Fix" is one of the most important tools in the process. Each Unable to Fix record feeds the feedback loop through a structured escalation flow, and contributes to the analytics engine that generates the next round of actions accordingly. The pattern of Unable to Fix categories is also where root cause insight lives, making it far easier to spot systemic issues across sites.
4. Retrospective
After each cycle, the team reviews results against goals, captures lessons learned, and makes adjustments needed in the settings or processes. For teams that commit to the process, what often starts as a time-limited initiative becomes a permanent operating rhythm. Some customers have run continuous IAT cycles for over a year because the value keeps compounding.
The Metrics That Actually Matter
One of the most common mistakes in inventory reduction is choosing the wrong target metric.
Tracking total inventory dollars in isolation is a trap. It incentivizes teams to take actions that hit the number by any means, including actions that create shortages, damage supplier relationships, or defer problems instead of solving them.
Successful teams include these as northstar metrics to tell the full story:
- Days of Inventory (DOI) / Inventory Turns: These capture financial performance on inventory in a way the CFO understands and that can be tracked from the buyer level all the way to corporate. Lower DOI and higher turns mean you are holding the right amount of inventory, and the right mix.
- Shortage count and trends: Inventory reduction that creates shortages is not a win. Tracking shortages and/or component availability alongside inventory metrics keeps teams honest about whether they are optimizing the mix or just cutting indiscriminately.
- Inventory Action fix rate and unable-to-fix rate: These are leading indicators. They tell you whether your team is making progress before the lagging indicators (DOI, turns) reflect it. They measure adoption and execution quality, not just outcomes.
A critical point on target-setting for multi-site operations: do not divide a corporate target evenly across sites. A site that serves as a regional hub for other locations has different inventory requirements than a standalone site. Targets need to reflect operational reality and be aligned across teams to avoid conflicting targets.
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Change Management
The most common reason Inventory Attack Team implementations stall is not a technology problem; it is a change management problem.
Leadership has a specific responsibility here: do not use APEX only as a reporting tool. The dashboards and Workbench are designed to help buyers get work done, escalate problems they cannot solve alone, and build a shared picture of what is blocking the team. When leaders respond to escalations by helping remove blockers rather than questioning why something was not done sooner, the culture shifts.
The early weeks of an IAT rollout are particularly important. Expect a high volume of "Unable to Fix" actions at the start. That is not a sign of failure - it is the process working. Teams are surfacing the backlog of blocked items that existed before the structure was in place. The job in those first weeks is to stay disciplined about logging root causes, clear the blockers as quickly as possible, and get into a continuous improvement process and mindset.
If you are leading an IAT at a site where inventory reduction has not been a priority, build in recognition from the start. Acknowledge when teams clear a meaningful escalation. Celebrate when a site hits a DOI target. The teams that sustain the process longest are the ones where progress is visible and recognized, from the VP level down to the buyer.
What About Teams Focused on Shortages?
A common objection goes something like this: "Our current focus is shortage management. Inventory reduction is not our priority."
That framing sets up a false trade-off. Excess inventory and shortages are often symptoms of the same underlying problem: the wrong inventory mix.
Many manufacturers have spent decades inflating overall inventory levels to prevent shortages, and it has not worked. Inventory went up and shortages continued, because the problem was never total volume. It was having the right parts available when production needs them.
When you deprioritize one item that does not belong in your queue, a PO you can push out or cancel, you free up supplier capacity to build what you actually need. Inventory reduction, done right, can actively accelerate the resolution of shortages by freeing up capacity at suppliers to replace with highly needed items.
This is exactly what APEX's Workbench is designed to support: PO actions for shortage management and inventory reduction in the same place, managed by the same buyers, against the same set of priorities.
How Inventory Actions Feed APEX Inventory Optimization
An important distinction: the Inventory Attack Team operates at the tactical execution layer. It is focused on acting on current-period recommendations: moving out a PO, canceling an unnecessary receipt, adjusting a min/max level that has drifted.
APEX's new Inventory Optimization capability operates at the strategic layer. It is the process of setting order policies, safety stock levels, and replenishment parameters in a way that prevents the excess from recurring.
These are complementary workflows. In fact, the sequence matters. Running the Inventory Attack Team first is valuable because it surfaces the real blockers, like bad master data, over-committed contracts, demand signals that no longer reflect reality, that Inventory Optimization and inventory management software for manufacturing need to account for. Going straight to optimization before executing tends to produce changes that teams question because the root causes have not been addressed yet.
The "Unable to Fix" data in APEX is a direct link between execution and strategy. When the same category keeps appearing in these escalations, that is a signal for the supply chain analyst or supply chain strategist to address the procurement process and inventory policies upstream. Execution informs optimization. Both make the other more effective, enhancing manufacturing processes and improving inventory data accuracy across multiple locations.
LeanDNA Experts Will Kick Off the Process With You
One thing worth knowing if you are considering running an Inventory Attack Team for the first time: you are not on your own.
LeanDNA's Customer Success team works directly with customers through the preparation phase, the kickoff, and the first weeks of execution, the period where blockers pile up and teams are most likely to lose momentum. That high-touch support at the start is intentional. The goal is to help teams build a structure that is clear enough, and embedded enough in daily workflows, that the process sustains itself through subsequent cycles..
The structure, the metrics, the team, and the meeting cadence have been refined across IAT implementations. What works has a pattern, and that pattern is available to every team that decides to run it.
Getting Started with Your Inventory Attack Team
Inventory reduction at scale requires more than supply chain execution software that generates recommendations. It requires an operating model that turns those recommendations into standard work, daily execution with leadership accountability, structured communication, and a feedback loop that makes the process smarter over time.
The Inventory Attack Team is that operating model.
If your organization is serious about inventory optimization, reducing working capital tied up in excess stock, and building supply chain resilience without compromising production readiness, the IAT process is worth a closer look.
Schedule a demo to see how APEX Inventory Actions and the Inventory Attack Team process work together.
