Thanks to current retail solutions, retailers can ensure they have the correct products in the right quantities when they need them.
This involves understanding when your suppliers will deliver items and how much inventory you have in-store when running out on products. It would help if you considered when and what to repurchase and track products while keeping in mind your pricing policy.
Unsuccessful inventory management cost US retailers over 300 billion dollars in 2018. Having a product surplus or deficit costs money, and retail inventory management helps prevent that.
How Do Retail Solutions Help Manage Inventory Efficiently?
Businesses can’t manage inventories by simply using spreadsheets. Apart from assisting with day-to-day business operations, innovative retail solutions offered by providers such as GOCretail.com can help retailers manage store inventories more efficiently and improve stock control.
Here’s how retail solutions help manage inventory more efficiently:
Keep a Record of All Product Information
Unique Product Identifiers (UPIs) and descriptions are created automatically by the inventory management software. This helps businesses locate products quickly and distinguish items that appear to be the same on the surface. Suppliers, lot numbers, stock-keeping units (SKUs), and other identifiers are frequently used to identify products.
To make tracking products and placing orders more convenient, suppliers often assign their own SKUs and product IDs. Specialised retail software and inventory systems can help you stay organised and synchronise product histories with your suppliers. This way, changes made on their end will automatically reflect on yours instantly, leaving less room for discrepancies. Moreover, as the experts at AccuBANKER explain, such tools can also be integrated with retail financial management solutions. For example, integrating the retail solution with the cash counter.
Some retail solution providers also provide Order Management Systems (OMS) and Distributed Order Management (DOM) to make inventory management more effortless.
Inventory Categorizing
Management of stock is the core of inventory management. The first step to identifying the most important and popular products is classifying inventory.
Once the important ones are identified, the business can focus more time, money, and resources on those products while also reducing the number of resources spent on less important products.
Retail solutions help approve the correct inventory management and costing system. It provides businesses with a choice to track inventory utilising a periodic approach that can be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. For retailers offering low-volume items, this can be a great benefit.
Retail inventory management software can also use other inventory management and costing approaches to make the whole process more efficient.
Analyse and Track Inventory-metrics
Using software to monitor inventory metrics ensures smooth and effective processes. The system can also point out flaws in your current inventory management system.
Inventory management software can measure the following essential metrics:
- The ratio of stock turnover
- The Fill Rate of Items
- Gross Margin Return on Investment (GMROI)
- Shrinkage
- Product performance and quality
These Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will show the overall health of your business, not just your inventory management.
Establishing Min and Max Order Quantities
Retail inventory management software can accomplish all the work for you. Some systems set automatic notifications for minimum and maximum product quantity levels, helping avoid overstocking and wasting capital.
Certain retail management systems can also automatically send purchase orders to vendors when stock levels drop. In contrast, others can notify you of the drop so you can send purchase orders to relevant vendors for replenishment.
