The Four Most Costly Stock Management Sins: How to Avoid Them & Drive Profit.

By suzanne - September 30, 2011 - Published under: Retail Insights ,Retail Solutions

How many times have you wondered:

  • How much inventory to hold?
  • How much to purchase?
  • Which products fly off the shelves, and which are likely to sit?
  • Should your inventory be marked down? 

Over and over again, right?  And if you make the wrong move, you end up losing money, wasting time and undermining your business.

STOP!  There are better strategies than guesswork!

Today’s user-centric point-of-sale solutions offer actionable strategies to ensure best practices to control your stock more effectively.

But before you can benefit from these cutting edge solutions, you need to analyze your current practices to make sure you aren’t making any of these 4 business-killing retail mistakes when you manage you stock: 

1. You rely on boring and meaningless data

Are you sick and tired of reviewing meaningless (and boring) data that doesn’t help you to manage your stock strategically.

You need reports that provide meaningful information so that you can make smart and informed decisions about your stock.
The information in today’s EPOS reports is usable, timely and easy-to-read.
A Stock Outage Report, for instance, can be automatically emailed to the person responsible for keeping the shelves properly stocked.  The report is succinct, organised in a meaningful way, and includes timely data for actionable follow up.

2. You don’t anticipate change

Do you make ad hoc decisions about your stock?  Are you more likely to react to catastrophe than to take preemptive and proactive measures?

Today’s EPOS Solutions can actually forecast stock levels and anticipate next steps before you find yourself in trouble.  With this information, you can replenish your stock levels more strategically as needed and at the right price.

3. Your data is old and static

To make smart and informed decisions, you need information in real time about what is going on at the point of sale.  And this information has to be accessible, round the clock, when you need it.

TRC provides Immediate Action Indicators on-demand via a web page, login, triggered or scheduled.  These Indicators detail the common sense behaviours of retailers, across industries, around the globe, every single day.

With these solutions, you can determine:

  • What is out of stock?
  • What must you purchase?
  • Why is a particular product not moving?
  • What is missing from your inventory?

Having this information at our disposal will help you to drive business, increase turnover and grow profits.

4. Your merchandise mix is random and uninspired

Do you merchandise your stock based on what sells, at what price and in what volumes?

If you are not using those insights to build your merchandise mix, you are leaving money on the table.  Period.

By closely monitoring what sells, when, at what price and what volumes, retailers can better understand how to optimise the merchandise mix.

Today’s EPOS solutions include these monitoring and reporting features and track point of sale behaviors so that inventory combinations can be optimised strategically.

Do you want to stick with the status quo or would you rather position yourself in the retail sector with cutting-edge tools to address your stock related challenges strategically and smartly?  If you choose the latter, in time, you will find that your stock is working for you, to facilitate growth, drive cost savings and save resources across the board.

 

 

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