During the review of the UA case, there were quite a few financial ratios that stood out as concerning. One of the metrics I would prioritize is days of inventory that UA is maintaining; their largest competitors and peer averages all saw a decline in this metric year-over-year, short of lululemon which saw a very minor (1%) increase, but UA saw this number rise by a staggering 19.2% from 2016 to 2017. To not take this completely at face value, I wanted to dig into the COGS (Costs of Goods Sold) first to make sure this increase wasn't potentially stemming from the "right" reasons for this cost going down. This didn't turn out to be the case, as the COGS rose nearly 6% year-over-year and reaffirmed that the days of inventory was increasing for the wrong reasons - an increasing value of inventory on hand, which happened to be recorded at over 26% growth from 2016 to 2017 on their balance sheet. This led to slower inventory turns, only 2.4x per year compared to the peer average of 3.4x, and ultimately just meant that more cash was tied up as working capital.

Improving this metric would help free up cash to use is other investment opportunities and lower the risk also incurred by maintaining such a high amount of inventory, especially in an apparel market where seasonality and new trends can be a serious concern (even for a brand such as UA which isn't focusing primarily on fashion). This would also improve other metrics with this focus, such as their return on assets, which was the only company listed that saw negative 2017 results, by lowering their inventory as a portion of their assets (made up nearly 29% of their total assets). Some supply chain ideas that might help this metric improve would be to home in on demand forecast accuracy and making sure that manufacturing wasn't over-producing to realistic sales expectations. To get this dialed in, the company could also look at a more JIT supply chain or even do some piggybacking off the concepts of Barilla (from SCM 800) and look at JITD (Just in Time Distribution). It can be a bit more difficult when your SKU lineup evolves much quicker than that of a food staple but reemphasizes the importance of accurate forecasting and not over-producing to expectations - this large amount of inventory on hand could easily translate to high markdowns in the future and diminishing profit margins as a result. UA needs to start course-correcting as I would anticipate things would get worse before they get better while they manage their excess inventory down, hopefully they can find a means of minimizing this, such as finding new distribution vs. only using their current channels.

Based on the article Under Armour Under Pressure, Ratio Analysis as well as information provided in the passage written above, how effectively can the strategy proposed improve the financial matric of Under Armour?