Inventory Management is the heart of retailers effort to manage their assets. It can be disastrous if they are not approached properly. A lot of retailers rely on the tools mainly on their point of sale systems or retail management systems. In some cases point of sale do not provide what they wanted or they tend to rely on other third party tools to manage these assets. You can simply rely on a spreadsheet or a  very complex enterprise grade systems which gives tons of options ( a lot of time it comes with increased complexity ) or it can be like the tools which retailcloud provides which balances simplicity and usability. 

Ultimately it should focus on

• Inventory Visibility
• Increase Sales & Turnover

Here are 5 ways to make Inventory Management easy

1. Organize your products with proper meta data.
2. Use inventory management tools which fit your needs.
3. Incorporate inventory management business process into your workflow.
4. Vigilant about your inventory.
5. Measure and Forecast.

Organize your products with proper Meta data.

This is one of the key first step to have a clean inventory. This is important not only for management but for visibility & discovery.

• Arrange the product into right classification such Department, Category , Subcategory. 
• Tag the product with as many attributes as possible such Ex: Style, Size, Color, Brand , Season etc.
• Have a very SEO friendly name or description.
• Have a detailed extended description.
• Have a beautiful image to the product.

Once you have a good organisation of the product, it is always easy to look into your inventory and sort, filter through your product whichever software or tools you may use.

Right Inventory Management Tools

Right tools are important for the job. Inventory management doesn't just end with adding or updating product , counting product. So it is important to have the right tool for the job. retailcloud provide various tools on POS, Web and mobile which can be chosen for your convenience . For some mobile may be convenient and it may be desktop for others.

A few examples of tools which may help

• Product Management tools like retailcloud web forms, mINventory mobile app
• Inventory Transaction Management tools like Inventory Manager, POS Inventory Module, CAS Web portal inventory management module. 
• Bulk import for inventory Management
• Purchase order utilities.

Incorporate Inventory Management business process to your workflow

It is always good to have good business process tied to your retail management. This can be when an inventory is brought into the location, moved between locations or if you have to account for damages. If you do not have any of these processes or not used to any of these don’t worry we have built workflows right into retailcloud tools so that you don’t have to do the heavy lifting.

Example of a few workflow process are

1. Inventory Receiving process to a locations ( Store Inventory , Warehouse Inventory )
2. Inventory Transfers between Locations
3. Inventory Reconciliation &  Cycle Counts
4. Purchase Order Management

If you have a custom workflow you can achieve this by leveraging our API’s . Check with us how we can help you to improve your inventory management  

Vigilant about your Inventory

It is always good to extra set of eyes to know what is going on with your inventory . The smart way to do is through notifications, alerts and approval management process

Retailers that participated in the 2016 NRSS say that employee/internal theft amounted to 35.8 percent of inventory shrink in 2015. The report also found that the average loss of dishonest employee cases dropped from $1,546.83 to $1,233.77

Source : losspreventionmedia.com

retailcloud provides various alerts for tools for configuring the alerts at various roles and a permission based feature activation.

• Alerts for product Management for any addition of modification
• Alerts for Inventory process or count updates ( ex: if someone manually adjust a sku to a certain inventory level )
• Approval process for Inventory Adjustment & Transfers
• Role based access for various Inventory management functions

In addition to this a more Actionable alerts like below will provide better insights to their inventory

• Overstocked & Under Stocked Reports
• Inventory below threshold

Measure and Forecast

Last but not the least measure your inventory or use tools which provide insights about inventory. Any of the above mentioned ways are not relevant if you don’t measure and have a good idea about how you should sell your existing inventory. 

retailcloud provide various tools to get you insights. Some of the amazing tools are

1. nGuage - A KPI mobile app focuses just on the indicators which matters for retailers
2. Dashboard - Back Office and in app dashboard on your POS.
3. Attribute Analysis Report - Show how your products perform by meta data.
4. Overstock & under stocked report.