Inventory for a practice is a simple calculation that most practices never write down. Your reorder point is the demand you expect across your supplier lead time, plus a buffer for the weeks that run hot. Everything you hold above that is capital sitting in a fridge doing nothing, and everything below it is a stockout waiting for a busy month.
The consequence is that your supplier lead time, not your sales volume, sets how much money you have frozen. A supplier who delivers same day inside Metro Manila lets you run a thin buffer, because the gap between noticing and restocking is hours. A supplier importing on a three week cycle forces you to carry three weeks of demand plus a margin for the cycle that slips. That is a real cost, it is rarely quoted against the per-vial saving that justified the import route, and it is usually larger.
Illustrative structure. Substitute your own demand figures.| Supplier lead time | Buffer you must carry | Effect on the practice |
|---|
| Same day, local stock | Thin, a few days of demand | Capital stays free, reorder is a weekly habit |
| 1 to 3 days, nationwide courier | About a week of demand | Comfortable for a provincial practice |
| 2 to 3 weeks, import cycle | Three weeks plus slip margin | Large frozen holding, cold-chain exposure on every cycle |
Practical cadence for a small practice: set a par level for each SKU you have actually committed to, count stock on the same day every week, and reorder back to par. Count against booked demand rather than hoped-for demand, because par levels set on optimism are how practices end up holding expiring stock of something nobody asked for. Split large orders across two dispatches where the supplier will do it, which halves what a single cold-chain failure can destroy.
Cold-chain discipline scales with holding. At practice volume you want a dedicated fridge rather than the staff fridge, a min/max recording thermometer, a plan for what happens when the building loses power overnight, batch numbers logged against a received date so a problem can be quarantined to one batch, and first in first out written down rather than remembered.