Alongside the people who watch your shelves, BlossomERP can staff a standing Inventory Manager: an AI role that watches demand forecasts, turns them into reorder advice, proposes draft orders for a person to confirm, and reports every Monday morning. It is the first of the AI managers introduced in §0.6 — and like every manager it never posts, approves or orders anything itself. It proposes; people decide.
Turning it on. The manager has its own switch, off by default: Company → AI & Capture → AI managers → Inventory Manager (the same switch appears in the setup wizard's Features step). Switching it off stops its duties and hides everything below — the manager simply isn't there. Beside the switch you may set its two monthly budgets (AI narrations and analytics runs) for your company; leave them blank to keep the standard budgets.
Where it lives. Everything the manager does is visible on the Inventory cockpit, in its own violet panel: its current findings, its forecast duties, its latest recommendations, its recent reports, and an Ask the manager box that answers from the manager's own patch — its duties, its recommendations, its accuracy — rather than the whole business.
Forecast duties, with their accuracy showing. The manager works from forecast duties: a forecasting setup you have tested in the Analytics Lab and promoted (Chapter 2). Once promoted, the duty runs on schedule, and its forecast feeds planning. The cockpit panel lists each duty with its last and next run and — always — its backtested accuracy (a figure called sMAPE; lower is better) standing beside it, so advice never arrives without the evidence for how much to trust it. If a duty's real-world accuracy drifts too far from its backtest, publication pauses, a finding on the cockpit says so, and the manager stops advising from that forecast until the duty is re-promoted or the pause is dismissed in the Lab. Advice from a stale forecast is worse than no advice.
Recommendations on the Replenishment worklist. When a product's projected stock falls to the level its forecast says is the reorder point — expected demand over the lead time, plus safety stock sized from how spread out the forecast is and the service level you run (95% unless your company sets another) — the product appears in a separate Inventory Manager recommendations section of the Replenishment page, in the manager's violet. These rows are not the usual average-based suggestions: averages look backwards, these look at the forecast. Each row shows the forecast per day, the safety stock, the manager's reorder point, the recommended quantity with its unit, when it is needed by, and the forecast's accuracy figure.
Prescriptive duties: allocations and service levels. The manager can also own duties from the Lab's two prescriptive job types (§2.16): an optimization duty that allocates expected demand across products and branches inside declared limits, and a simulation duty that plays a stocking policy forward over the forecast spread. Their recorded solutions arrive in the cockpit panel as findings — the allocation with its objective value and the evidence that every declared constraint held, and each product whose simulated service level trails the target your company runs, with the order-up-to level the recorded run computed to meet it. Like everything the manager produces, these are recommendations: nothing is ordered, moved or posted by them, and a product with no promoted forecast or prescriptive duty behind it simply has nothing to show — the panel says so rather than filling the space.
Proposals are drafts, and a person confirms. From the cockpit panel or the worklist, Ask the manager to propose draft orders files a proposal in the Action Assistant (Chapter 2) under your name — because the proposal carries your permissions, not the manager's. Review it there and confirm, and draft purchase or work orders are generated for the usual workflow; reject it and nothing happens. Asking twice never duplicates an open proposal.
The Monday briefing. Every Monday at 07:00 your company's time, the manager files a briefing into the Document Library (Chapter 14, tagged as a manager report) and emails it to everyone who can view the stock enquiry. It covers the week's demand movers, forecast versus actual for last week — with the accuracy figure beside the numbers — stockout and expiry risks, the recommendations made and what became of their proposals, and whether any duty has drifted. Every briefing ends with its workings: which duty run, which configuration, which governed figures it used. A briefing that cannot show its workings is not sent.
The monthly closure. On the 1st at 07:00 the manager also files a monthly inventory closure: the stock position at the close of the month just ended — units on hand, what is committed and on order, and the value on current balance costs, read from the same live stock ledger the stock enquiries read — the cover and reorder position with the shortest-cover lines named, the ABC mix, the stock that has not moved in thirty days with its value, the lots expired or nearing expiry, and the forecast outlook for the month ahead where a duty is publishing. It is filed and emailed the same way as the briefing, to everyone who can view the stock enquiry.
Ask the manager. The manager's panel answers the stock questions directly, in one tap or in your own words: What is our stock value?, How many days of cover do we hold?, Which stock has not moved?, What is our sell-through?, how stock value spreads across the ABC classes — each class's share of the stock value at the latest snapshot, with its product count, grouped by the governed class the planning parameters carry — how fast stock turns and what return it earns by category, and Explain this product for the product on screen — its position in every warehouse, its cover, its reorder line and its expiry watch, every quantity with its unit. It will also explain the module's own terms — why there are two days-of-cover figures (one follows the pace customers are buying at now, the other the demand on the planning parameters), what reorder points and safety stock mean, how lots and FEFO expiry work, and why a forecast has paused. Its readings are the same governed figures Ask itself states — the manager inherits them rather than keeping a second set of numbers.
Budgets, in plain terms. The manager spends from two monthly budgets of its own, on top of your plan's AI allowance. If a budget runs out, the manager does not stop: its briefings keep arriving with the numbers only (no written narration), and a finding on the cockpit explains why. The panel's header always shows how much of each budget the month has used.