What is inventory management in the retail industry?

Retail inventory management is the set of processes that ensures the right products are in their right quantity in inventory. Right products mean the products that shoppers want excluding the unnecessary items. Right quantity means that the stock is neither too little nor too much on hand. Therefore, it is all about meeting the customer demand on time without facing stock out issues or carrying excess supply.

How technology is covering the retail industry

This era is all about digitization — technology has overcome many industries across the globe. Similarly, retail inventory management software is one such example that has taken control of the e-commerce industry. There are many software solutions available on the internet. One such example is SMACC. It’s the ultimate cloud-based software for managing the inventory of any sized business. It has more than 85,000 users across the globe. Its popularity stands on its rich features of automation in inventory management.

Well, technology has served us with immensely fruitful inventions. These inventions have helped humans to save time, money and effort.

Contrary to the new trends, classical trends in retail inventory management involve the use of spreadsheets and paperwork. Wherein, the spreadsheets have limited functions to perform complex calculations. This limit in calculations and slowness in the speed of performing them leads to the need for a better solution. 

However, there are many problems in classical methods of inventory management. Some of them are mentioned below.

Problems in Classical Inventory Management

• No Inventory Synchronization Across Multiple Sales Channels

With stock management via spreadsheets, each sales channel has a different spreadsheet for managing the same stock. Therefore, merging the updated record is quite complex, especially when there are multiple sales channels.

• Greater Chances of Human Errors

As discussed above, manually updating each record after every sale might catch wrong calculations. These errors further get multiplied when different spreadsheets containing errors are merged.

• Incorrect Sales Records

Entering each record manually can have human errors. These records can lead to incorrect sales records. Consequently, incorrect sales records will end up producing an incorrect budget plan.

• Overselling and Overstocking Complaints

When you don’t have the accuracy in stock records and sales, you ultimately face overselling and overstocking. For instance, you start restocking unnecessarily if inventory records are wrongly entered lesser than the actual inventory stock. This leads to the overstocking issue where you invest a good amount of money in buying extra stock.

All of the above issues cost you a lot of money with every episode of failure in inventory management. Therefore, to help you save from these problems, cloud-based software digitizes most of the inventory management operations. This helps you eliminate the chances of human errors and save money that is especially needed for recovery. 

Let’s read below how cloud-based retail inventory management software helps you boost business productivity and growth.

How Retail Inventory Management Software Overcomes the Issues

Here are the reasons how retail inventory management software helps businesses to grow more by overcoming the above-stated issues.

• Say No to Overselling!

Cloud-based software manages the inventory and all the aspects of the business management on a central hub. Thus, no matter how many sales channels there, the software automatically updates the inventory with every sale. Therefore, your stock products always reflect the accurate stock level in the inventory.

• Boost Business Efficiency & Productivity

The software for inventory management aims to automate a number of manual tasks to improve day to day business operations. For instance, sorting bulk orders on paper manually takes a lot of time. To save the time and effort of doing this, the software system automatically sorts all the orders. This factor makes the team more efficient as they become more available for other vital operations that need their attention.

• Achieve Cost-Effectiveness

The system that automates the processes of inventory management prevents businesses from several losses. This is why ultimately it saves the recovery costs as well. For example, you don’t have to spend money for overstocking when you always have the right amount of stock in inventory.

Therefore, the system ensures you the least operational cost possible whilst managing the business inventory.

• Gain More Control Over the Business

When you have a lot of things to do manually, you lose control over the business efficiency. But when the software covers most of the operations that you’re doing manually, it provides better control over the business. Things get more organized and controlled. 

Therefore, when you have inventory’s clear visibility, you can clearly view business performance. You know how much stock you need, how much is left, how much will you need in future. All of this is possible with automated intelligent methods.

Moreover, authorized access to the system according to the different user roles ensures data integrity and security. Otherwise, like classical inventory management on spreadsheets, anyone can access the data.

However, having registered user roles in the system, you can track and monitor staff activity. This will help you analyze their performance to demonstrate the areas of appreciation or improvement.

• Forecast Future Demand

The powerful software for managing inventory gives you features of reporting and analysis. You can analyze the sales over time, either monthly, weekly or annually. With these reports, you can demonstrate the current situation of your sales and identify your potential products that produce greater revenue. This is how, with comparison in reports, you can forecast the future demand of the products accurately. This also saves your budget as you don’t spend money on buying unnecessary stock. However, you can experience rapid business growth with the software ultimately.