Dead Stock Value, SAP

Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Ecommerce Platform

Items with on-hand value > 0 and zero sales in 180 days. Direct write-down candidate.

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At a glance

Materials with on-hand stock (MARC.LABST > 0) and zero sales (no goods issue from sales-document delivery) in the last 180 days. The direct write-down candidate at year-end audit. Sums the valuation value of those materials. Configurable threshold (180D default; 365D for spare parts; 90D for fast-fashion).

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your SAP data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A US enterprise B2B distributor on S/4HANA Cloud. Snapshot 03 May 26. This is 5.0% of total inventory ($57.4M). Within the typical 3 to 8% range for B2B distribution but on the higher side. Five things to notice:

1. $2.88M of dead stock means$2.88M of capital not earning a return. Carrying cost at 25% per annum = $720K/year of pure waste. At 30$2.0M; at 50% markdown, $1.4M; at full write-down, zero.
2. Year-end audit risk. External auditors typically require a write-down on materials aged 365+ days with zero sales velocity. The $1.64M in the 365+ bucket is a likely Q4 P&L hit unless cleared first. Better to clearance-sell at 30 to 50% off than take the full write-down.
3. Drill into Top SKUs by Inventory Value to see which materials dominate. Pareto applies: 20% of dead-stock materials drive 70% of dead-stock value. Action the top 50.
4. The killer cross-platform finding: Dead Stock with Active Ad Spend. A subset of these dead-stock materials is still being advertised on Google / Amazon / Meta. The merchant is paying to drive traffic to products it cannot sell. That cross-platform join is the highest-impact finding from this card.
5. Multi-Company-Code aggregation. Dead stock per CC: US $1.84M, CA$640K, MX $400K. The MX warehouse has lower dead-stock concentration but smaller base; the CA warehouse has the highest dead-stock-as-percent at 7.6%, suggesting either over-ordering or local demand softness.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in S/4HANA Cloud:

Slow-Moving Stock Fiori app Inventory Aging Fiori app filtered to 180+ buckets Material Documents Overview transaction MB51 with movement-type filter Embedded Analytics: CDS view I_MaterialStockMovement

Direct deep-link: https://my{tenant}.s4hana.cloud.sap/sap/bc/ui2/flp#SlowMovingStock-display Why our number may legitimately differ from SAP’s Slow-Moving Stock report: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why 180 days? Industry default for distribution. Spare parts: 365D. Fast-fashion: 90D. Configurable per merchant. Are seasonal items unfairly flagged? Yes if you do not configure seasonality. A material flagged dead in mid-October but sells reliably from November to February should be excluded via a seasonality calendar. Vortex IQ supports seasonality flags via the field map’s material-master enrichment. New product launches before they sell? Configurable warmup period (default 90 days from goods receipt). New materials within warmup are excluded. Inter-plant transfers, do they count as sales? No. Movement types for stock transfer (301, 311, etc) do not reset the sales-velocity clock. Only movement types 601 / 602 (delivery from sales-document) count. Production consumption, does it count as sales? No. Movement type 261 (consumption from production order) does not count. The material is “used” but not “sold to a customer”, so it is not exiting inventory in the way that resets the dead-stock clock. Should I write down at year-end or sell at clearance? Both have audit-acceptable treatment. Clearance recovers some value; write-down accepts zero. Most enterprise auditors prefer the merchant tries clearance first if commercially feasible. Multi-Company-Code, how does dead stock translate across CCs? Each CC computes independently. A material can be dead in CC 1000 (no sales there) but active in CC 2000 (sales there). Internal stock transfer between CCs is a treatment option (move the dead stock to where demand exists). SAP Material Ledger / Actual Costing, does it change the value? Yes if your tenant uses Actual Costing. Dead-stock value at periodic actual cost may differ from standard or moving-average. Card uses each material’s price control by default. Reservation against dead stock, what happens? A material with a reservation (e.g. for a future production order) but otherwise zero recent sales velocity still counts as dead until the reservation consumes it. The reservation just delays the write-down decision. T-codes for drilling in? MMBE (stock overview), MB52 (stock list), MB51 (material documents history), CKM3N (price analysis), MR21 (material price change for write-down).

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Dead Stock Value is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across SAP and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.