Stocking up on products you don’t know will sell and hoping for the best is no strategy. If you’re running a retail or wholesale business, everything in your store or warehouse must be planned and ordered in advance.
To generate sales and move stocks from your warehouse to your customers, you should know which products to stock and how much you should order. Moreover, you need to determine when you will sell them and what you’ll do when you cannot sell them.
These factors make up your inventory planning. Inventory planning involves budgeting and demand forecasting. Sales data or trends are factored in to find out what the most favorable inventory levels are and the best timing for markdowns, promos, or sales.
When you effectively implement your inventory planning, your e-commerce store can save on logistics costs, time, and resources. You’re also growing your network of satisfied customers who can buy what they want anytime and receive their purchases on schedule.
Inventory Planner Implementation Tips to Maximise Your Success
Inventory planning supports your supply chain’s seamless operation. As such, it requires a few tasks and procedures like inventory tracking and forecasting, as well as storage optimisation. Moreover, there are a few tips and best practices so your inventory planner implementation will be a success.
1. Conduct Regular Stocktakes
To effectively implement your inventory planning, you should have accurate data.
Count your inventory on a regular basis to keep discrepancies to a minimum. This way, what’s displayed in your database is an accurate representation of what’s really in your shop or warehouse.
You can either do a full inventory count (once every season) or cycle counting (partial counting of inventory continuously to monitor stock levels without disrupting your business operations).
Whichever method you choose, performing regular stocktakes ensures accurate stock levels and data that you can use for inventory planning.
2. Make Your Team Accountable
For inventory planning implementation to be a success, everyone and everything involved must be working together. Thus, each team member must do their part, from ordering, receiving, selling, and shipping products, to generating reports.
This is why promoting accountability and responsibility should also be prioritised to make sure that everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing and completing their tasks on time.
3. Automate Tasks
Make things easier for your employees or your team by automating tasks in your inventory planning implementation.
An inventory management system can crunch the numbers or generate reports for you if you need to see your products sold or their sell-through rate. When you automate inventory tasks or processes that you do on a monthly basis, you also save time and resources.
Cin7 Inventory Planning
An inventory and order management system like Cin7 gives you access to the most robust analytics and reporting to help you measure almost anything in your business.
If you have multiple sales channels, you can aggregate data from each sales channel for each product into one data set. You can then see information to help you make smarter business decisions, like the highest ROI, or shipping and order requirements.
And because you’re able to maintain up-to-date data and view it in real time, you can also accurately forecast demand.
With Cin7, you can connect your inventory, order, shipping, and accounting workflows. Whether you’re a small business owner or a growing business, you can benefit from its many intuitive and advanced features.
If you want to learn more about Cin7 inventory and order management software, message, email, or call us. You can also request and book a demo!
