Reorder points: never run out of tubes, chains and pads

A customer walks in on a Saturday morning with a flat, four bikes already ahead of him in the queue, and you discover the 28" tubes ran out on Thursday. It's not a one-off. It's the scene that repeats in nearly every shop at least once a season, and it's almost always avoidable. Reorder points for consumables aren't a warehousing exercise for the textbook — they're the difference between a Saturday that makes money and one where you turn away paying work because a two-euro part is missing.

The four consumables that can never run out

Tubes, tires, chains and pads are the stable core of aftermarket demand: they don't follow trends, they don't depend on which bike model is hot that year, they wear out through plain physical use. They're also the items that, when missing, turn a ten-minute repair into a customer who leaves and might not come back. On these four the logic is simple: don't manage them by gut feeling, set a reorder point per SKU, and reorder when stock hits that threshold — not when you notice the shelf is empty.

The reasoning behind the threshold is practical, not statistical: how many units of that size or compound you typically sell or fit in an average week, multiplied by how long your supplier takes to deliver, plus a safety margin for the busy Saturday or the sunny weekend that fills your shop with flats. If a 28/32-622 tube moves five units a week and your supplier delivers in three days, a reorder point around ten to twelve units covers you even through an above-average week. E-bikes add another variable: they now account for roughly a quarter of bike sales in Italy and are already the majority of what comes through the door for repair, so the sizes and compounds tied to e-bike tires and drivetrains — often specific, often pricier — deserve their own threshold, not the same rule you use for standard bikes.

Why flat stock numbers aren't enough anymore

If you run more than one location — the shop floor, a van for on-site jobs, maybe a second store — the reorder point needs to be read per location, not just at the shop level overall. A cached stock figure showing ten pads that are actually seven on the shop floor and three sitting in a van under maintenance gives you a true number that's useless for deciding whether to reorder: what you need to know is what's genuinely sellable, right now, where it's needed. It's the same reason every stock movement — a sale, a part fitted on a work order, a transfer between locations, a count adjustment — should always carry a reason code: without that traceability, the reorder point becomes a guess instead of a number you can defend when the supplier asks "are you really selling that many?"

The real problem isn't just reordering, it's lead time

A well-set threshold doesn't help much if the supplier takes weeks to fill the order. 2022 taught the industry its harshest lesson: roughly 40% of parts ordered that year were never delivered, with lead times stretching up to 24 months on some components. Since then, discipline has shifted: shops that got used to working with realistic reorder points — calculated on their supplier's actual lead time rather than the optimistic one printed in the catalog — weathered the shocks better. It's worth revisiting thresholds at least twice a year, because lead times shift and so does the mix of bikes coming through the door (more e-bikes, more specific components).

Getting organized without losing your mind

You don't need a complicated system to start: a dozen or so SKUs — the tube and tire sizes you sell most, the standard chain, pads for the most common disc brakes — with a threshold written down somewhere and an alert when stock gets close to it. That's the kind of discipline that, once it's digital and tied to the rest of your operation — work orders, multi-location inventory, sales history — stops being a sticky note and becomes something that keeps working even while you're bent over another bike. If you run a shop and want to see this done without chasing the shelves by hand, CrankPal builds exactly this — reorder points, per-location stock, tracked movements — into the core of its platform for workshops.