Your customer experience, operations, and bottom line suffer when inventory is inaccurate. Accurate inventory is directly related to good receiving practices. The most common effects of bad receiving we have found are:
Incorrect inventory quantities
Wrong quantities result in overselling or underselling inventory. Misplaced inventory
Inventory you cannot find is inventory you cannot ship.
Both of these issues are incredibly impactful in obvious ways; lost man-hours researching and re-counting stock, lost customers, lost profit. The unseen cost, however, is potentially more impactful than the direct costs. It’s the cancerous work-arounds and broken processes businesses invent to attempt mitigating these damages in addition to the lost opportunity cost of not focusing on growing your retail businesses. One statement I hear time and time again is,
“When inventory gets low on an item, we pull it from all but one of our sales channels and send someone from the warehouse to recount inventory so we don’t oversell.”
This solves the problem of overselling, but postpones the satisfaction of clearing out inventory from the warehouse as quickly and profitably as possible. Your retail operations software should drive processes which allow you to trust your inventory and push your business to the limits.
Here are three ways we’ve helped businesses take control of their receiving process and ultimately trust their inventory:
Blind receiving
An unbiased inventory count. Your receiving team shouldn’t be concerned with how many units of an item are supposed to be there, rather they should be focused on how many units of an item ARE there. We’ve found that subliminal prompts of what quantity receivers should be counting influence what they actually count. An added bonus of blind receiving is over-shipped inventory is far more likely to make its way to the warehouse shelf than home with an untrustworthy employee who realizes the discrepancy.
Barcoding
Know where your inventory is from the moment it is received. With a quick 3-step receiving process; product is identified, quantity is entered, current location is assigned, and barcode labels are generated and applied. RetailOps makes it easy using our iOS app to accurately move and manage inventory from receiving to shipping.
Image Verification
Confirm you are receiving the right thing. An intuitive interface displaying product images increases accuracy of your receiving team by providing them with a timely graphical verification to match inventory coming in with the correct SKU in your catalogue. Simple, effective, and built directly into the workflow to avoid unnecessary steps.
Retail operations software should make your life easier. The ultimate retail software provides you the tools to accelerate your business. Keep in mind these three must-haves when searching for your solutions. There is always a cost to compromising. Finding the right solution must go deeper than simply checking off the “product receiving” and “barcoding” boxes on a list of features.