As a retail store manager, you are continually faced with the difficulty of handling customer demands. Aside from clients, you must also manage your stock and inventory, personnel, accounting, and other parts of day-to-day business operations. You can solve existing and adjacent challenges with efficient retail inventory management for smoother business operations and transactions. This topic will be concealed in greater detail further down.
What is inventory management?
Inventory management is a methodical technique for managing, selling, and keeping inventory raw material and final product for efficient inventory management in the firm. It is critical to keep inventory at the appropriate level, in the right place, at the right time, and the right cost. Inventory management and instore stock management apps are critical for all industries, particularly manufacturing, retail, and e-commerce industries, regardless of their size.
What are the various types of inventory management?
There are several ways to handle your inventory, depending on your business type. A retail shop can use Zadinga inventory management tool to monitor their inventory themselves. Or they can work with a third-party inventory management expert who will incorporate with the retailer’s technology stack. This will give the total merchant transparency over the supervision of their finished goods.
Just-In-Time (JIT):
Just-In-Time is a strategy of inventory management that tries to reduce the number of finished products stored and reorder products to replace those already sold. This strategy is advantageous in lowering storage costs, but it may result in longer lead times. If your company’s goal is to reduce storage space and your things are not time-sensitive, JIT can be a successful solution.
Cycle counting:
Inventory cycle counting is a sampling approach that allows you to assess how well your inventory records match up with what you actually have on the shelves. Cycle counting is an important aspect of many firms’ inventory management methods. Because it ensures that consumers get what they want, when they want it, while keeping inventory holding costs to a minimum. The cycle counting method is less intrusive to everyday activities and can be customised to adapt to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) merchants and brands.
Materials requirement planning (MRP):
Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) is an older inventory management system that constantly analyses what is needed, how much is needed, and when needed. Working backwards from a finished goods production plan, MRP turns the final products into their basic parts and raw materials needed to make the final product within an agreed-upon timetable. MRP is an effective inventory management approach for retailers who make their items rather than a supplier.
How does inventory management work in practice?
Once you become an inventory management expert, an analysis is performed to map out your product line against barcodes and storage locations and evaluate your necessary storage capacity. As well as an evaluation of your daily product dimensions, weight, shipping volumes, and technical infrastructure will ensure a complete connection with your sales channels.
Bottom line
Inventory is critical to the successful operation of a business. Finally, having a dependable inventory management system may assist you in keeping track of your goods and sales for increased profitability.
