Why Inventory Accuracy is Important and How Inventory Management Systems Make It Possible
Retailers and ecommerce businesses record thousands of sales, orders, receipts, and reorders daily. These rising volumes and the need to get a larger chunk of profits make inventory management a difficult endeavor.
It has also become a key driver of CSAT, as customer happiness is directly linked to the availability of their favourite products and how fast they are delivered.
Accuracy is one parameter that plays a critical role in this retail machine. And many inventory control management systems that companies use today haven’t evolved for modern retail.
In this blog post, we’ll discover what inventory accuracy is and how it’s a big factor in successful retail.
What is Inventory Accuracy in Inventory Management?
Inventory accuracy is a metric in inventory control management that’s associated with the inconsistency or disparity between physical and recorded inventory data.
It’s an integral part of inventory management and directly affects your ability to connect customers to the products they want, when they want them, and determine their levels of satisfaction.
However, you don’t want to overstock, as it will lead to wasted resources. It’s a delicate balance that, if done right, can help you keep your customers satisfied and your profits up.
That’s where inventory control ecommerce systems come into the picture. These tools provide you with real-time stock levels in your warehouses, making it easy to adapt to demands, adjust supply, and, overall, make informed decisions.
Benefits of Accurate Inventory Management Systems
1. Detect Issues Fast
Doing inventory manually can introduce some errors in your systems, some of which can snowball into inventory issues later on. Yes, it’s pretty common for some items to get overlooked or mistakes to be made in creating sales orders.
Sometimes, late reporting on inventory management issues can cost you a lot of money in missed sales and in holding unnecessary items.
On the other hand, correct information on inventory levels can help you spot problems as and when they occur and avoid any surprises when you prepare an annual stock report months later.
A proper inventory control management system, such as Ordazzle, can reduce these problems with real-time information on sales and purchase records.
2. Low Operational Costs
When you have precise and updated records of the stock levels, you know what products can go out immediately and which ones will require time to be shipped.
This allows you to pick-pack-shop more effectively for customers. Moreover, your staff doesn’t need to run from shelf to shelf to locate items.
For instance, if you only have a few pieces left of a popular item, manually searching for it, especially in gigantic warehouses, can be difficult. However, with an inventory management system, you will have information about when and where you shipped the last item.
All in all, you can process orders faster, cut down on operational costs, and therefore, balance your resources more efficiently.
3. Better Store Experience
The stores of the future will be built on experience. With an accurate outlook on your inventory, you can bring down the friction in processes like returns and exchanges while improving the store’s overall efficiency.
Moreover, with a dedicated ecommerce system you no longer need massive stores with goods stocked from wall to wall. You can make your inventory available to be sold across your network of warehouses, stores, and distribution centers.
As a result, you have smaller stores with less inventory and more experiential elements, such as lounge areas, influencer meet-and-greets, and in-store workshops.
At the end of the day, you have more resources to create opportunities for positive engagement, making your customer experience that much more captivating and valuable.
4. Better Planning and Response
Volumes are always rising and falling in ecommerce and retail. Businesses that accurately predict these tides are better equipped to keep their sales numbers and performance up.
To do forecasting and planning properly, inventory visibility is a key strategic element. You need to know what’s happening to your inventory over a specific period of time.
This allows you to calculate inventory management requirements for future orders while also providing insights into customers’ spending behaviours, patterns, and trends.
Real-time inventory data is a key denominator in all of this. Not only planning for the future, but building an appropriate response to dynamic events as well. These events include a sudden drop or increase in demand in one or multiple locations. When you have a real-time, accurate picture of your inventory, how quickly can you move your stock to satisfy urgent demands.
This way, you can shore up the sale instead of turning customers away.
Approaching Inventory Accuracy the Right Way with Inventory Management Systems by Ordazzle
The bottom line is that to keep satisfying your customers, retail brands need to maintain effective and accurate levels of inventory, for which you need the right inventory management technology by your side.
As providers of omnichannel retail solutions, we at Ordazzle have a successful track record of handling complex supply chains with our top-of-the-line inventory management solutions.
Connect with us right away to know more about our ecommerce solutions.