Usually inventory management in the retail industry is chaotic. The business starts with one or two stores, a few years later the network has dozens of stores, branches, distribution warehouses, etc.
And the more active the company grows, the easier it is to miss the point when inventory management becomes inefficient for retail chains:
- Sales outlets open in different regions, and inventory is distributed according to the old logic: «bring it to any point from any warehouse».
- It costs more and more to move goods between warehouses and stores, but there is no time to put things in order.
For some items there is a constant shortage, for others there is a surplus. The bad news is that this chaos is typical of most retailers. The good news is that it is fixable.
Retail Inventory Management Techniques
At the time of the pre-production survey of the company, all orders were generated by merchandisers in the accounting system in semi-automatic mode, which increased labor costs and reduced the quality of orders. There was no convenient tool to analyze the reasons for missed sales and surpluses.
If management decided to optimize and automate the stock management system and introduce additional tools to monitor the inventory level.
The following objectives were set before launching the project:
- Inventory optimization.
- Order automation./li>
- Increase of customers' loyalty by means of high level of goods availability in the stores.
- Opening of new sales outlets by increasing profits.
What we offer for optimization of inventories:
- In the process of connecting 7 stores joined 2 cafes, for which orders to the supplier had to be done separately from the stores. And a bit later, thanks to the quality work of the program, it was decided to connect 12 more grocery stores of the format «around the house» with an area up to 50 m2, the connection of which had not been provided before.
- Project implementation consisted of three stages:
- Preparation for the launch of the Cetera system.
- Training of work with the program, its algorithms and functionality. Connection of 7 stores.
- Learning to work with system reporting. Connection of central warehouse.
During the first stage we discussed internal business processes of the company to define the tasks of preparing the program implementation. Terms of reference for the organization of automatic data exchange between the accounting system of the company and the Cetera Labs system were agreed upon and implemented.
Dynamic buffer management
At the second stage the assortment of 7 stores was connected — in Cetera Labs buffers (target stock level at each storage point for each SKU) were calculated. Safety buffer data was also updated, allowing the Cetera system to maintain the stock needed for both sales and display.
But the main stage was the maintenance and technical support of the site.
