Out of Stock Inventory
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You’re a data analyst at a global CPG distributor that tracks daily stock availability across ~80 countries for the brands in its portfolio. The operations team wants to triage which brands are exposed to systemic supply-chain risk, which have only localized issues, and which are running clean so they know where to spend investigative cycles.
You have access to a daily inventory table:
inventory_status
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
date |
DATE | The day the snapshot was taken |
country |
VARCHAR | ISO country code where stock is held |
company |
VARCHAR | Brand in the portfolio |
product |
VARCHAR | SKU identifier |
is_out_of_stock |
BOOLEAN | TRUE if the SKU was out of stock at any point that day in that country |
Over the trailing 30 days, every company in the portfolio falls into one of three buckets:
- Resilient — no stock-outs anywhere.
- Localized risk — stock-outs occurred, but only ever within a single country.
- Systemic risk — stock-outs occurred across multiple countries.
Given this bucket distribution, propose three business hypotheses the operations team should investigate to act on these results. For each hypothesis:
- State the mechanism you think is driving the pattern.
- Describe the follow-up analysis that would confirm or kill it.
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