In today’s highly competitive business environment, retailers strive to achieve consistency, effectiveness & profit in their business but cumbersome manual processes continue to hurt them. Whether you are a wholesaler, manufacturer or retailer; inventory management can maximize the value of your business. Although E-commerce is showing an upward trend, firms are not yet aware of the importance of holding an automated inventory management system.
When you’re a product-based company, inventory control is an obvious part of your business. But are you doing what you can to leverage an automated inventory system and reporting to make smarter, more effective decisions?
Here are a few reasons why inventory system automation and product reporting is crucial for multichannel sellers:
- Maximize scalability
Developing a scalable business model relies heavily on the systems you’ve implemented. Manually entering inventory in spreadsheet documents is not scalable. Emailing and calling your employees to figure out how much inventory you have on hand is also not scalable.
Spending any extra spare hour, you have analyzing data from multiple locations is most certainly not scalable for business nor your personal well-being. As your order volume grows, all of these stale “systems” you’re running today will break–it’s just a matter of time.
If you want to scale your business, taking the time today to move to automated systems will enable you to gather information faster and make smarter decisions for the future.
- Decrease human error
Ditch the age-old inventory spreadsheet templates. Manual entry in inventory spreadsheets can often open opportunities for human error, leading to overselling or underselling.
Often, several team members will need access to edit and update inventory information at any given time, and those changes will go unsaved if user access is limited. This decreases product reporting accuracy and increases the likelihood of error and purchasing issues.
- Visibility into inventory
When you remain on spreadsheets, you lack inventory in real-time. Backordered items are missed sales opportunities, and customers that do wind up purchasing a stocked-out item will encounter a number of different issues.
Besides the obvious potential loss and frustration of the customer, your customer service team will have to spend time reconciling it, and potentially give out discounts or promotions as the last call to retain the angry customer. And, chances are, there’s more than one customer that was affected. Keep your customers happy and your inventory moving with automated inventory system tracking.
Your brand can experience serious issues when manually reconciling and adjusting inventory from location to location. Since manual inventory tracking will not sync your inventory and update any inventory levels, there’s no way to properly adjust that data in time.
- Tracking Manual Inventory
Similarly, manual inventory and reporting doesn’t work when brands transfer inventory, since the inventory accounting and financial information associated with that stock often isn’t accounted for.
This means, for example, that if a supplier charges more for the finished good than usual, and you have to ship via air because the item is late and you don’t want to miss out on sales, the extra costs associated with that item won’t be accounted for properly without a centralized hub of that gathered information.
- Save Time
Spending any extra spare hour, you have manually analyzing data pulled from disparate systems and multiple locations is most certainly not scalable for business nor your personal well-being. And as your order volume grows, all of these stale “systems” you’re running today will break–it’s just a matter of time.
- Customer Satisfaction
When operating on manual systems, your customer service will be working overtime reconciling issues and handing out conciliatory promotions to retain the customer. It’s hard enough to hook a customer in this competitive retail landscape, but to lose a customer due to inventory issues is frustrating and unnecessary.
A part of scaling your business is to understand how you can expand efficiently instead of linearly, so you can effectively maximize your time. If you want to scale your business, taking the time today to move to automated systems will enable you to gather information faster and make smarter decisions for the future.
With automated inventory system tracking and reporting, you’ll save hours of manual entry. Automated inventory management software and reporting, like we offer at Goods Order Inventory Management, helps you save time and enables you to make smarter decisions about your business.
No more futzing with manual inventory counting. Your business is a full-time adult now, so let’s treat it like one.
Find out more benefits of cloud-based inventory management software.
Ready to give us a try? Sign up today for your FREE trial! Contact us for a detailed DEMO of the Inventory Management Software.