As someone with limited shop-floor experience compared to my colleagues, I assumed that a real-time stock management platform was a normal piece of technology for most brands and retailers. It’s become clear to me over the last few months while I’ve been learning about our new product, Archean, that surprisingly, it’s not as common as I thought.
But why not? It’s hugely important, and without it, those retailers who don’t have a real-time stock management platform are missing out on so many benefits.
Better Customer Service
Even for small brands with a much lower quantity of stores than your average well-known retailer, real-time stock visibility is essential. As time goes on, shoppers are expecting a much higher quality customer journey, and real-time stock visibility, as well as confidence in the accuracy of this stock position, is a huge part of this. Maybe a customer tells a retailer that they can’t find a product in their size within the store they are shopping in. Using a stock management system allows the retailer to order one on behalf of the customer, or point them in the direction of something similar. With an accurate and real-time stock management platform, retailers can quickly respond to customer queries and satisfy them at every point in their customer journey.
Accurate Stock Management Builds Trust
With a real-time view of stock across all sites including stores and warehouses, shop-floor teams have the capability to know when another batch of products is about to be re-stocked. This means that disappointed customers can be told when they can come back to store to pick up a product that they were sad to miss out on the first time around. Building trust is essential as it increases customer loyalty and therefore sales. With a stock management platform, retailers are giving their shop-floor teams the best tools to help their customers efficiently.
Early Detection of Discrepancies
If retailers keep a close eye on stock information, discrepancies will be seen and addressed much earlier. Without a real-time stock management platform, retailers are more likely to discover discrepancies during an annual stock take, when a discrepancy has likely already cost the retailer. For example, incorrect locations being logged, inadequate handling of damaged or returned goods, or flaws in inventory control procedures. Retailers need to know about these issues as soon as they occur, rather than down the line when they have grown into much larger problems.
Accurate Stock Management Stops Retailers from Wasting Money
Retailers are well aware that they need to spend their money wisely, which means ordering a higher quantity of well performing products and ordering lower quantities of less popular products. Products that sit in stores or warehouses for months on end are just taking up space. A real-time stock management platform enables retailers to quickly differentiate the popular products from the less-popular products. Identifying the latter allows retailers to put them on sale or offer other incentives to get them out of stores and warehouses, making room for something else.
Reduction of Missed Sales
Without having an accurate and real-time view of stock, retailers will find it’s easy to accidentally run out of stock, and therefore miss out on sales. Retailers should use a live stock report to quickly view products that are low in stock, compare stock levels with what has been selling successfully, and placing orders before running out.
Due to the constraints of legacy environments, having a real-time stock management platform is not the norm for most retailers, but as you can see the benefits are huge. Archean, Retail247‘s stock management platform, delivers all these benefits and more. It can be custom built around legacy systems, meaning that our clients do not need to strip back their existing technology landscape, but instead use Archean as a platform to truly enable real-time stock visibility.
Archean’s Key Principles
- Archean is a suite of solutions, the integral one being Archean Core, which delivers high volume transaction processing and maintains stock positions at site/sku/state level.
- Stock can be broken down to any number of Stock States.
- How each Stock Transaction affects the Stock States is also configurable (meaning that all transactions can be defined in Archean).
- Transactions can be consumed from any source, embracing a retailer’s existing technology landscape with the option of deploying other Archean modules.
- Once processed, transactions can be passed to any legacy solutions as required.
To learn more about Archean or book a demo, get in touch.