Why your SKU catalog shouldn’t be controlled by procurement alone—and how cross-functional input drives smarter decisions.
Refractory distributors operate in an environment shaped by complexity—thousands of SKUs across bricks, castables, plastics, and modules. But who decides which products stay in the catalog and which get cut? Too often, it’s one department—procurement, sales, or operations—making isolated calls without cross-functional visibility. That’s where a Product Review Council becomes indispensable.
A Product Review Council (PRC) is a structured forum where stakeholders from sales, procurement, inventory, technical, and finance meet regularly to assess SKU performance and make catalog decisions. In the refractory space—where one client’s hero SKU is another’s dead weight—the PRC can be the difference between lean growth and margin decay.
Why Create a PRC?
Because SKU proliferation is a silent threat. One-off customer requests, inconsistent vendor terms, and siloed decision-making can balloon catalogs. The PRC aligns everyone on four key goals:
Improve working capital by trimming underperforming SKUs
Increase service reliability by focusing on high-velocity materials
Strengthen vendor leverage by concentrating spend
Protect technical integrity by avoiding mismatched specs
Who Should Sit on the Council?
The most effective PRCs are cross-disciplinary. At minimum, your team should include:
Sales Manager: Brings insight into customer preferences and quoting trends.
Procurement Lead: Understands supplier agreements and MOQ constraints.
Inventory Manager: Knows actual movement, dead stock, and turn rates.
Technical Rep or Engineer: Ensures SKUs meet application standards.
Finance Analyst: Calculates margins, holding costs, and net profit by item.
This diversity ensures decisions are balanced—not just financially viable, but operationally executable and customer-aligned.
What Should the Council Review?
The PRC should meet quarterly, with a focused agenda:
SKU Performance Report: Velocity, margin, and order frequency.
Customer Complaints/Returns: Are certain SKUs underperforming in the field?
Vendor Changes: New MOQs, discontinuations, or pricing shifts.
Redundant SKUs: Are multiple SKUs serving the same technical purpose?
Emerging Needs: Are clients requesting materials not currently stocked?
This is not about trimming SKUs blindly—it’s about identifying where your catalog is bloated or misaligned with strategy.
A Real-World Example
A Midwest-based distributor found through their PRC that they were carrying three separate phosphate-bonded ramming mixes—all with similar specs. After technical validation, they consolidated to one, saving over $30K annually in warehousing and reducing mis-picks. Meanwhile, the PRC approved adding a high-strength insulating castable line in response to new biomass boiler clients—proactively supporting growth.
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A Product Review Council puts guardrails around your refractory catalog. It turns SKU decisions into strategic conversations, not firefighting responses. When sales, operations, and technical voices all have a seat at the table, your catalog becomes tighter, more responsive, and better positioned for growth.
