When the Person Who Runs Your Inventory Leaves

When your inventory manager gives notice, you aren’t just losing a person. You may be losing the system.

They know your reorder points by memory. There are products they watch more closely than others. They remember which vendor to use, what to substitute during a backorder, when seasonal demand starts to change, and make dozens of small decisions every week without anyone noticing.

For years, inventory may have worked because one person knew how to make it work. And then they give two weeks’ notice.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the practice planned poorly. Inventory knowledge tends to concentrate in the person who is good at the job. Because the system works, nobody has much reason to document exactly how it works.

Until they need to.

This article is for two readers: the one who just received that resignation and has two weeks, and the one who hasn’t, but is suddenly wondering how much of their inventory system lives in one person’s head.

What actually walks out the door

Most managers assume they know what they’d lose. It’s usually more than that. Some of what typically lives only with the inventory person:

• Reorder points that were never entered anywhere. They’re in the PIMS for some items, in a spreadsheet for others, and for the rest they’re a feeling about when the shelf looks low.
• Which rep to call for what, and which ones actually pick up.
• The reasons behind the decisions. Why you order X from Y, why you stopped carrying Z, why the order goes in on Wednesdays.
• The count rhythm. Which items get counted weekly, which quarterly, and which never because they don’t matter enough.
• PIMS workarounds. Every practice has a few, and they’re rarely written down.
• Where things physically live, including the overflow shelf in the back that isn’t labeled.
• Seasonal patterns. When flea and tick ramps up in your region, how far ahead to order for it, and what happened last year.
• Backorder substitutes. What you swap in when the usual product isn’t available, and which clients notice.
• Distributor relationships, buying-group details, and any special pricing that was negotiated verbally.

It’s the accumulated judgment of someone doing the job well. And it’s exactly the kind of thing that doesn’t transfer on its own.

If you have two weeks

You won’t capture everything, so don’t try. Prioritize.

Start with the items that matter most. In most practices, a small share of SKUs accounts for most of the spend. Those are the ones where a missed order or a double order costs real money. Sit down with your inventory person and document reorder points, order quantities, preferred vendors, and lead times for the top 20 to 30 items by value and volume. Everything below that line can be reconstructed from order history later.

Talk through a week, not a manual. Asking someone to “write everything down” in their last two weeks produces a thin document. Ask them to walk you through a normal week instead: when they count, when they order, what they check, who they call. Record it. A conversation captures the reasons, and the reasons are what you’ll need.

Collect the logistics. Vendor logins, contacts, and account numbers. Open orders and anything currently on backorder. Rebate and buying group information. Controlled substance logs and who is responsible for them after the departure date.

Note the workarounds. Ask directly: “What do you do that isn’t in the PIMS?” There are often spreadsheets, handwritten notes, standing reminders, or small routines that exist only because the formal system doesn’t quite cover what the team needs.

Introduce the successor now if you can. Even a few overlapping days are worth more than a perfect handoff document. If there’s no successor yet, have the person most likely to cover ordering shadow the last week.

If you have time

If your inventory person isn’t going anywhere, this is the version to build. Same items as above, done properly and stored somewhere the practice owns.

Put reorder points in the PIMS. Not in a spreadsheet, not in a notebook. Your PIMS already has fields for reorder points and order quantities, and the point is that the next person can open it and see what the practice decided.

Put the count schedule on a calendar. A cycle count cadence that exists as a recurring calendar entry survives turnover.

Keep vendor information in one place. Contacts, account numbers, negotiated pricing. One document, updated when things change.

Write the short version of “how we do inventory here.” Two pages, not twenty. How often you count, what gets counted when, how orders get placed and approved, what to do when something is on backorder. This is the document that turns the job from a person into a role.

Label the shelves. Physical documentation is underrated. A labeled shelf with reorder tags on items tells the next person what the item is, where it goes, and when to reorder it, without anyone having to explain.

None of this replaces a good inventory person. It means the practice keeps what that person built.

Onboarding whoever comes next

The new person’s first instinct will be to reconstruct the previous person’s judgment. That’s a hard thing to do and a slow way to start. Give them something better to lean on.

Day one: the top-items list with reorder points and vendors, the count schedule, the vendor sheet, the “how we do inventory here” document, and a walkthrough of the physical space.

Month one: expect them to follow the system rather than improve it. Give them the order history to look at. If a reorder point looks wrong, they can adjust it, but the starting point should be the practice’s data, not a guess.

Set expectations with the rest of the team. For a few weeks, some things will take longer and a few orders might be slightly off. That’s normal. What you’re protecting against is a new person quietly building a new system from scratch because the old one wasn’t visible.

Making the system outlive any one person

The thread through all of this: the practice’s inventory decisions should come from the practice’s data rather than being remembered by an individual.

This is where software helps, and it’s what Inventory Ally is built around. It uses your order history to build a weekly cycle count schedule, prioritizes items by value and sales volume so the high-impact items get counted most often, and recommends restock amounts for each item. The reorder logic is generated from the practice’s own purchasing patterns, which means it doesn’t live in anyone’s head. It works alongside your PIMS, pulling from what’s already there and, on supported platforms, writing counts back.

When someone leaves, the schedule keeps running. When someone new starts, they open it and see what to count this week and what to order. The judgment of the person who built the system is preserved in the data that system runs on.

The takeaway

The best inventory systems preserve what your best people know, even when those people aren’t in the room. Whether that’s a two-page document and a calendar, or a system that does the math for them, the goal is the same: a practice that keeps running well when the person who ran it moves on.

If you’re curious what an inventory system built on your own order history could save, the Inventory Ally savings calculator takes about two minutes.