In management accounting, reorder level (or reorder point) is the inventory level at which a com-pany would place a new order or start a new manufacturing run.
Reorder level depends on a company's work-order lead time and its demand during that time and whether the company maintain a safety stock.
If a company maintains a safety stock, reorder level calculation changes are follows:
Reorder Level = Average Demand × Lead Time + Safety Stock
Reference:
LO 2, AC 2.3

A 'U' flow occurs when the goods receipt and dispatch functions are located at the same end of a warehouse building.
Products flow in at receiving, move in to storage in the back of the warehouse, and then to shipping, which is located at the adjacent to receiving on the same side of the building.
Items with higher throughput level are located closer to the loading bays. An example of a 'U' flow design can be seen in the diagram below.
Advantages of 'U' Flow
- Excellent utilization of dock resources because the receiving and shipping processes can share dock doors
- Facilitating cross-docking because the receiving and shipping docks are adjacent to one another and may be co-mingled
- Excellent lift truck utilization because put away and retrieval trips are easily combined and be-cause the storage locations closest to the receiving and shipping docks are natural locations to house fast moving items
- Yields excellent security because there is a single side of the building used for entry and exit Reference: CIPS study guide page 28 LO 1, AC 1.1

Delphi method was developed in the 1950s, originally to forecast the impact of technology on warfare. The method entails a group of experts who anonymously reply to questionnaires and subsequently receive feedback in the form of a statistical representation of the "group response," after which the process repeats itself. The goal is to reduce the range of responses and arrive at something closer to expert consensus. The Delphi Method has been widely adopted and is still in use today. Delphi method is a subjective forecasting technique Holt-Winters forecasting is a way to model and predict the behavior of a sequence of values over time-a time series. Holt-Winters is one of the most popular forecasting techniques for time series. It'sdecades old, but it's still ubiquitous in many applications, including monitoring, where it's used for purposes such as anomaly detection and capacity planning.
Time series analysis is a statistical technique that deals with time series data, or trend analysis. Time series data means that data is in a series of particular time periods or intervals.
Objective forecasting approaches are quantitative in nature and lend themselves well to an abun-dance of data.
There are three categories of objective forecasting methods: time series, caus-al/econometric, and artificial intelligence.
LO 2, AC 2.3

Net present value (NPV) is the 'today' net value that deprives from 'future' cash flow of an invest-ment or a capital purchase. Net Present Value is a helpful tool for assessing the total lifetime value of an investment. Procurement professionals or investors can base on this value to make decision to achieve value for money. Generally, an organisation should select the offer which has the highest NPV among their options. Preferably, the NPV of an capital investment should be positive, which means the investment eventually adds value to the business.
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.2

The core idea of lean manufacturing is actually quite simple...relentlessly work on eliminating waste from the manufacturing process. Waste is defined as any activity that does not add value from the customer's perspective. According to research conducted by the Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC), fully 60% of production activities in a typical manufacturing operation are waste - they add no value at all for the customer.
On the other hand, agile manufacturing places an extremely strong focus on rapid response to the customer - turning speed and agility into a key competitive advantage.