This article pairs with our savings calculator here, where you can estimate potential savings for your own company.
Before running the numbers yourself, you might be curious: what kind of results have others seen? We’ve worked with 19 companies — a mix of current clients and prospects — across more than $450 million in inventory and 85 000 optimized orders. We asked a simple question: how much did GenLots actually save you?
The results are based on real data and real operations — spanning inventory cuts, smarter order planning, quantity discounts, and waste reduction. If you’re wondering what’s realistic, here’s what we’ve seen in the field.
Reduction in Inventory and Order Cost
To our knowledge, GenLots is the only company delivering the optimal trade-off between ordering costs, inventory holding costs, quantity discounts, and waste reduction.
From what we’ve seen, GenLots significantly reduces inbound inventories (raw materials & components) in Manufacturing, Packaging, and FMCG. In Pharma, it’s trickier. There, the cost of quality control favors fewer orders — so the trade-off shifts.
What we’ve also found is that many companies operate with a bias. When the directive is to prioritize supply security, teams tend to over-order, pushing inventory way above safety stock levels. When the focus is on cash flow, they order in small batches, driving up the number of orders. GenLots helps strike the right balance — without compromising safety parameters.
More than just industry-specific trends, the savings potential varies a lot from company to company. It depends on the bias in place and how cost-conscious planners are, as shown below:
There’s a wide range. The lowest inventory reduction we’ve seen was 4.5%, and the highest was 52%, with an average around 21%. When it comes to order reduction, both the spread and the percentages are even higher — from 20% up to 75%, averaging out at about 50%.
Yes, you read that right — on average, our clients see a 20% cut in inventory and a 50% drop in POs. That’s how we back the numbers you’ll find in our calculator — and we’ve even made those a bit more conservative to be safe.
Savings on Purchasing Price – Quantity Discounts
Every CPO dreams of automatic savings on purchasing prices — and GenLots delivers. But this depends on how much of your spend is subject to scale pricing.
In Pharma, for example, ingredients like APIs often have yearly contracts with limited pricing flexibility. In contrast, Packaging items — labels, notices, and so on — change frequently and benefit from large quantity discounts, which is typical in printing due to high setup costs.
Not all of our clients have scale pricing, so we don’t throw around blanket figures. But when they do, we’ve seen up to USD 2 million in savings on a $10 million spend (20%). That’s why we suggest clearly identifying the portion of your spend with quantity discounts — from there, we apply a conservative 5% savings estimate.
Waste Reduction
We’ve long integrated smart handling of batch expiry, re-controls, shelf life, and artwork changes. One client even uses a phaseout upload for timely artwork changes. Another benefits from a material transfer process between overstocked and understocked sites.
All of this leads to real reductions in waste. We estimate about a 15% cut in waste, but it can be much higher with the right customizations.
Final Advice
When sharing these numbers internally, we recommend a classic approach: underpromise, overdeliver.
We once reduced inventory by 15% — which is great by any standard — but got pushback because we’d forecasted 20%. Better to beat expectations than fall short of them.
Congratulations! You have read this article and are now ready to calculate your ROI!
