Effective inventory planning is the main responsibility of a retailer. Right amount of inventory with good quality products, at all given times is all you require for a smooth functioning of a retail business. If the inventory needed is not in alignment with the demand in the market all the efforts made to produce inventory are wasted.

Read More: 5 major challenges in supply chain management

Common inventory management challenges:

Inaccurate data:

A business needs to know, at any given point, exactly how much inventory they have. Inaccurate data leads to overstocked or understocked inventory. When demand falls, overstocking can lead to wastage of inventory and managing dead stocks. Under stocking can cause loss of opportunities and can hamper a business’s reputation.

Demand volatility:

During the pandemic many businesses saw that there is a huge volatility in consumer behavior and demand of the products. These uncertainties invariably lead to overstocking or under stocking of inventory.
It can only be managed if a business has access to latest data on market trends, buying behaviors, and demand forecasting through advanced AI to adjust the production rates accordingly.

Inconsistent tracking:

Tracking inventory manually through different spreadsheets and software is a time consuming process and is obviously prone to human errors. These errors may seem small but can cause some major losses, especially in times of high demand volatility.

Supplymint – one stop solution to overcome inventory challenges:

Supplymint offers demand and OTP planning through proprietary AI, which assists in accurate demand forecasting. It takes into consideration factors like seasons, weather, events, yearly patterns, planned markdown, closing inventory and other anticipated changes.

This module of supplymint offers AI-assisted OTP plans for various goods to meet the market demand. Open to buy plans give inventory flexibility to the retailers so that they never run out of inventory in times of high demand. This can be done for categories as well as sub categories for retailers to be aware of the amount of inventory left and needing to be ordered.

This also gets integrated with the ERP, WMS and accounting systems to get relevant teams to have up to date information to schedule orders based on changing consumer behavior, seasonal trends and material availability.
It also discovers the gap between actual sales and budgeted sales so that in-depth reports can be created to study the changes in the demand and how a business should evolve around those changes in order to earn higher revenue and grow the business.

For more articles like “Inventory management challenges and solutions”, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.