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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Ecommerce Platform
Inventory value bucketed by days-on-hand. Aged stock is cash trapped on the floor.

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At a glance

Inventory value bucketed by days-on-hand: 0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-180, 181-365, 365+. Aged stock is cash trapped on the floor: capital tied up, warehousing cost, write-down risk. The single-most-cited inventory health metric for SAP-running B2B distributors.

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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. 181+ buckets together = 15.5% of total. Just over the 15% alert threshold. Card fires. Five things to notice:
  1. **15.5% in the 181+ buckets means 8.92Mofcashistrappedinstockunlikelytosellatfullprice.∗∗Ata58.92M of cash is trapped in stock unlikely to sell at full price.** At a 5% annual carrying cost (storage + insurance + capital), that is 446K/year of pure waste. Add the markdown loss when these eventually clear (typically 30 to 50% off list), and the recoverable value is 4to4 to 6M.
  2. The 365+ bucket at $2.08M is the dead-stock candidate. Pair with Dead Stock Value to confirm zero-velocity. Most of these will become full write-downs at year-end audit.
  3. Compare to last quarter’s snapshot. A worsening aging curve (181+ growing month over month) is the primary leading indicator of overstocking. A flattening curve means clearance is working.
  4. Action playbook: drill into the top 50 SKUs in the 181+ bucket using Top SKUs by Inventory Value. Pareto applies: 20% of materials drive 70% of aged value. Markdown the top 50 first.
  5. Multi-Company-Code view. Aging is computed per material per plant; rolled up to Company Code. CC 1000 (US) at 16.8% and CC 3000 (MX) at 22.1% suggests the MX warehouse has worse rotation than US. Could be local demand softness or excess inbound shipments.

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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:
Inventory Aging Fiori app (F2961) Slow-Moving Stock Fiori app Stock on Hand by Period Fiori app Embedded Analytics: CDS view I_MaterialStockMovement joined to current stock
Direct deep-link: https://my{tenant}.s4hana.cloud.sap/sap/bc/ui2/flp#InventoryAging-display Why our buckets may legitimately differ from the Inventory Aging Fiori app: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Healthy distribution mix? B2B distributors typically run 50 to 65% in 0-90 buckets, 25 to 35% in 91-180, 10 to 15% in 181+. Higher 181+ percentages signal overstocking. Seasonal businesses, the aging looks worse mid-cycle? Yes by design. Winter coats stocked in August will age into the 91-180 bucket by mid-October before selling out in November. Configure a seasonality calendar so the alert does not fire on expected seasonal builds. FIFO vs LIFO? SAP supports both via Material Ledger. The card defaults to FIFO ageing for the dashboard view (which makes operational sense: which physical units are oldest); the GL valuation may differ if the Material Ledger uses LIFO for tax purposes. Configurable bucket boundaries? Yes via field map. Industry defaults: distribution 0-30 / 31-60 / 61-90 / 91-180 / 181-365 / 365+. Slow-fashion: 0-90 / 91-180 / 181-365 / 365+. Spare parts (long lifecycle): 0-180 / 181-365 / 365-730 / 730+. Per plant or rolled up? Both. Default rolled up; drill-down per plant is one click. Materials with planned high-stock buffers (e.g. spare parts), should they show in the alert? Configure them as exempt via material master custom field or material group. The alert can exclude designated buffer-stock materials. Inventory Carrying Cost calculation, what rate? Default 25% per annum (storage 8% + insurance 2% + capital 12% + obsolescence 3%). Adjustable per merchant in field map. T-codes for drilling in? MMBE (stock overview), MB52 (stock list with filters), CKM3N (material price analysis), MBEW (valuation table direct).

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Inventory Aging 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.