As a retailer you’ve probably experienced a huge shift in demand, seen consumer traffic shift to online shopping, and have probably had to face closed shutters for a few months. The pandemic isn’t over yet, but the world has started to move on and consumers are now starting to step out again. Despite this fact, consumer spending patterns are more unpredictable than ever. In order to efficiently deal with this and avoid over or under stocking items, retailers (online and offline) need to shift to a system of real time inventory management.
What is real time inventory management?
As a retailer you probably have various means or channels of sale; website, social media, offline, etc. Keeping track of all your orders in one place and getting real time updates on when a product is due for refill or out of stock is what real time inventory management refers to.
How can real time inventory benefit me?
Managing your inventory manually is time consuming and often leads to a lot of delays, it also leaves room for errors like forgetting to update your stock. If you’ve invested in an ERP system then you’ve probably realised by now that it’s rigid, expensive to update, and requires great maintenance, and long periods of testing.
Also managing your inventory from multiple sales channels involves a lot of your personal time and effort. Here’s 3 ways real time inventory updates can help you streamline your business:
- Managing inventory and orders across multiple outlets: Keeping a track of your inventory is crucial, you don’t want to be lying around with dead stock but at the same time you don’t want to be running out of stock too often either. Under stocking always poses the risk of your consumers going elsewhere, this is especially true in today’s time when consumers have the option to find alternatives for virtually any product in a few clicks. With integration you can connect your backend inventory management systems like ERP or POS to sync and get inventory updates from all your sales channels across multiple locations in real time. This allows you to see and compare how each outlet in your chain is performing.
- Connecting digital and offline inventory for order fulfilment: If you’ve got an online and offline presence both, connecting your online inventory management systems with your on premise one can help you streamline your sales, you could be saving money by reducing on the space in your fulfilment centres and stock lesser inventory if you connect and leverage your in store inventory and directly ship from store.
- Provide your customers with more options: Even though consumer shopping patterns have radically changed, their expectations remain the same! Consumers love shopping online but hate waiting for their orders. By having real time inventory updates you can enable your customers with the information on where they can find the product they’re looking for in a store. This also makes the process of returns and exchange’s easier for customers, and the more accessible and easy you make your customers' lives, the more likely they are to keep coming back.
- Automate restocking: There are a lot of products that you know are fast moving, automate the process of restocking your products by setting limits to when they drop beyond a certain point. Keeping a track of your inventory in real time helps you take actions and analyse your products performance in real time as well.
How do I enable real time inventory management?
All of this sounds amazing, but how do I enable real time inventory management? With automation you can quickly integrate your existing systems to interact with each other and start receiving real time updates. APIs and Integration are a fuss free, cost and time efficient way to build a dynamic workflow model, and Quickworks no code automation tool makes it easy for anyone to automate in no time!
Get in touch with us to know more about creating a connected inventory management system and receiving real time updates!
