Inventory Management

A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing

The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Inventory Management course, in the Business Development category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.

This is the course for anyone whose cash is sitting on their own shelves. It works in the order the work has to happen: first, see the stock truly — inventory as cash that stopped moving, the four costs counted honestly, records you can trust, counting that counts through cycle counting, shrinkage measured and matched to controls, ABC classification so attention follows the money, turns and days of supply, dead and slow stock named plainly, and the availability promise your operation is actually keeping; then, keep it right — forecasting from your own history with moving-average forecasting and forecast-error checks, lead time measured rather than quoted, the reorder point set as a trigger, safety stock sized on purpose, how much to order through the economic order quantity, the purchasing cycle run without gaps, and the numbers read on schedule so the system stays honest. You finish by proving the whole course — in The True Count and in The Stocked-Right Plan. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.

The fences, stated plainly. Every worked number in this course is computed in the open, step by step, from the learner's own figures — their own shelves, their own costs, their own records — so the reviewer and the student can check it. No benchmark statistics are cited as facts about the world: the course prints no claim about a typical shrinkage rate or an average carrying rate, because every rate the work needs, the learner builds from their own operation. Tools are described by role, never by brand: a tracking system, a receiving log, a count sheet — no named inventory software appears anywhere in the course. The standard methods are named correctly and taught by their ordinary names — cycle counting, ABC classification, moving-average forecasting and forecast-error checks, lead time, reorder point, safety stock, and the economic order quantity — and where a method is a model, its assumptions are stated where it is taught: the economic order quantity assumes steady demand, a fixed order cost, no quantity discounts, and no shelf-life limit, and the course teaches what to check when real life breaks each one.

This is the twenty-third course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person training Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.