What it measures
% of inventory classified as slow-moving or obsolete
it measures the financial consequence of stock that has already failed to sell, reflecting forecasting or commercial decisions made 3-6 months prior. The P&L hit for write-offs is already locked in when the KPI is calculated.
Business impact
- Increased 'chaos tax' from managing dead stock: wasted warehouse capacity, excess stock movements to access active SKUs, and management time consumed in endless meetings about clearance promotions that rarely work.
- Direct destruction of working capital. Cash is tied up in pallets of unsellable product, consuming finite warehouse space and preventing investment in inventory that actually generates revenue and margin.
- Sustained high SLOB% forces a supplier into reactive, often unprofitable, self-delisting of underperforming SKUs, frequently under pressure from a retailer's category manager demanding better portfolio productivity.
Formula
(SLOB value / Total inventory value) x 100Grain
One row per material per batch per storage location per day
Inside the Implementation Pack
A preview of what's actually built for this KPI — extracted from the real Implementation Pack, not a mockup.
This is the primary ratio the pack's other measures build on — trend, rank, and period-comparison variants, all on Fact_Inventory_Snapshot.
Fact_Inventory_Snapshot— 9 mandatory columns — batch key, days since last movement, ...Dim_Batch— batch_key + batch_nbrDim_Material— material_key + material_descriptionDim_Plant— key + nameDim_Storage_Location— key + nameDim_Warehouse— key + nameDim_Date— Auto-generated calendar table — no customer data required
Full field-by-field data contract, in 4 SQL dialects (SQL Server, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery), ships in the pack.
| Target | 0.008 — performance considered compliant at or below this line |
| Warning | 0.02 — amber alert — triggers a review |
Both live in one Excel tab — change them, refresh the report, done. No DAX editing needed.
Everything you need to build Slow-Moving & Obsolete Stock (SLOB) % in Power BI — dimensional model, DAX measures, SQL views, and a food-industry demo dataset.