Instead of managing inventory manually or periodically, cloud-based inventory and order management solutions equip you to manage inventory perpetually with real-time updating and counts.
The benefit to you and your customers is having the right inventory in the right place at the right time. It also allows you to monitor sales channels, locations, and currencies within a company-wide single source of truth.
Let’s break that down into three pillars of an inventory management strategy …
To join the ranks of the world’s fastest-growing businesses, you must have the inventory visibility necessary to trust your inventory quantities and locations.
It’s next to impossible to manually update and synchronize inventory counts and locations if you have a multichannel strategy. Lacking visibility often results in out-of-stocks, deadstock, and preventable returns. Your inventory quantities and locations must offer an honest accounting of stock quantities and locations.
In addition, transparency challenges you with unvarnished data that inform crucial decisions. For instance, it can significantly improve fulfillment and delivery accuracy which reduces returns.
Enhanced inventory visibility also helps you better track your inventory turnover ratio — a key metric in assessing the health of your business. Such insight can inform product pricing adjustments and future re-stocking decisions to improve profitability.
Inventory management should make life easier, not harder.
The right process takes the guesswork out of scaling your business and minimizes the risk of mistakes. With real-time visibility at your fingertips, you can make data-informed decisions about:
And you can do it all with the speed needed to stay competitive in an evolving market. Combining quantitative and qualitative modeling melds historical sales data with current economic and market forces to better predict demand and allocate inventory accordingly. With the right system, you’ll have access to the insights necessary to make smarter, more profitable decisions.
Focus on growth, instead of tedious day-to-day tasks.
With automation, you’ll never run out of inventory as you’ll receive automated backorder notifications and replenishment reports in real-time. For instance, if the quantity of an item in stock drops below the reorder value, automation can instantly alert you that the item needs to be reordered.
With the right integrations, replenishment may be automated too or the automated restock alert can be checked against predictive demand forecasts and then reordered.
With multi-location inventory, automated rule-based order routing can match orders with stock in warehouses that are closest to the customer. Routing orders in this manner saves time, expedites fulfillment, and reduces shipping costs.
Finally, automation can also help you improve the customer experience and increase retention with automated order confirmation emails. The system you select may integrate with your email service provider, which positions you to update customers regarding the status of their shipment and sends emails with discounts, upsell, and cross-sell opportunities.
As you grow and finesse your inventory management strategy, it’s essential to choose a system that can integrate multiple links in your supply chain — from pure stock control to shipping, eCommerce, logistics, accounting, and beyond.
The aim is to integrate and automate as many of your supply chain components as possible to improve inventory accuracy, speed, and cost.
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