3 Ways Supply Chains Will Solve Your Inventory Problems in 2015, from GT Nexus.
Retailers are ready to seek new ideas and technologies to tackle their biggest problems. Omnichannel will continue to be the focal point of retail strategy, but the topic of inventory management should draw a heavy dose of interest this year.
Inventory management is an ongoing retail problem, where carrying too much stock versus not having enough impacts both profitability and customer satisfaction. Improving inventory levels across multiple channels will continue to be a serious challenge in 2015, exacerbated by consumer trends. As our most recent holiday shopping season showed, shoppers are favoring ecommerce more heavily than ever before.
But the right outlook and the right technology can help. Here are 3 methods for improving your inventory this year:
Upstream Vision
Inventory is sometimes misconceived to be just a store-level problem. Or at best, a distribution-center problem. But it’s not. What happens down on those lower levels directly results from what goes on up in your supply chain. Think about it: how quickly goods get from your suppliers to your factories to your customers affects how much inventory you carry. The architecture of your supply chain also determines the assortment of goods you can stock, and how effectively you can allocate product to their optimal markets and channels.