With disruptions exposing supply chain vulnerabilities, efficient inventory management is vital for resilience and success. Automating core processes delivers powerful benefits across operations, cash flow, planning, customer experience and more.
Here we explore six key advantages from optimizing your inventory management:
1. Increased Customer Satisfaction
Inventory automation enables faster fulfillment, preventing lost sales from stockouts. Satisfied customers that receive orders quickly are more likely to repurchase and recommend your brand.
Reducing Stockouts Through Real-Time Tracking
Stockouts frustrate customers and can significantly impact revenue. One survey by CommerceHub found that nearly 75% of shoppers will switch brands after just one stockout. Real-time inventory tracking provides visibility to avoid running out of key products.
RFID tags, IoT sensors, and other technologies can monitor stock levels across facilities in real-time. The system automatically triggers reordering when thresholds are hit. This prevents gaps between when items sell out and new stock arrives.
Speeding Delivery Times
Even if a product is in stock, delayed shipments also hurt the customer experience. Efficient warehousing and order processing ensures items ship quickly once ordered.
Automation expedites steps like inventory allocation, picking, packing, shipping confirmation and customer notifications. Automated routing through the warehouse can cut order processing time in half. Customers receive their orders faster, increasing satisfaction.
One survey found 52% of customers consider 3 days or less to be an acceptable delivery time. Efficient inventory management makes faster fulfillment possible.
Driving Higher Loyalty & Revenue
With automation reducing stockouts and speeding deliveries, customer satisfaction sees significant gains. 72% of customers will share a positive experience with others. Satisfied customers also spend more – one study found their lifetime value can be 5x higher.
By delivering reliable product availability and fast fulfillment, businesses create positive experiences that foster loyalty and growth. For example, Lowe‘s saw 95% higher revenue from satisfied omnichannel customers compared to single-channel shoppers.
2. Improved Cash Flow
Inventory management plays a key role in optimizing cash flow across both payments and receipts:
- Automated vendor payments – Paying suppliers on time ensures steady inventory deliveries
- Accelerated customer payments – Fast order fulfillment means quicker collection of receipts
This smoothes cash flow fluctuations and improves financial planning.
Vendor & Supplier Payments
Paying vendors on schedule is crucial for maintaining supply inventory as expected in the production cycle. Late payments can disrupt the inflow of materials and inventory if it impacts the vendor relationship.
However, manual payment processing can lead to delays, miscommunication, and human error. Accounts payable automation ensures suppliers are paid precisely on the agreed terms without fail.
With on-time vendor payments guaranteed, inventory and materials availability stays on schedule. This provides stability in production cycles further downstream.
Customer Order Processing
Delayed order fulfillment leads to late customer payments and unpredictable cash inflows. Automation speeds up order processing, shipping, and receipt of customer payments.
Once an order is received, automated systems can immediately check stock, issue an invoice, calculate shipping estimates, and process the shipment. This reduces lag time between a sale and receiving payment.
Smoother cash flow allows better forecasting of upcoming liquidity requirements. McKinsey estimates optimized inventory management can improve cash flow by 19-22% through these vendor and customer processing automation benefits.
3. More Accurate Demand Forecasting
Inventory optimization requires planning future demand. Automated data collection provides granular insights for boosting forecast accuracy:
Challenges of Inaccurate Demand Signals
In a survey by Institute of Business Forecasting, 63% of companies said their demand forecasts are manually adjusted more than 50% of the time. Relying on hunches often fails, leading to instability in inventory levels.
Underestimating demand causes stockouts and lost sales. Overestimating demand results in excess inventory, requiring price markdowns later to clear shelves.
Automating Data Collection
Inventory management systems automatically gather data like:
- Point-of-sale transactions
- Ecommerce order history
- Inventory levels
- Lead times
- Promotions and pricing history
- Macroeconomic factors
Collecting this data consistently eliminates blind spots from only looking at siloed datasets. It provides complete visibility into demand drivers.
AI-Driven Forecasting
Advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms can then process these demand signals to detect patterns and generate highly accurate forecasts.
Time series analysis accounts for trends, seasonality, and other variables. AI models become more precise over time as more data is accumulated. Companies see typical forecasting error reductions of 10-20%.
4. Higher Operational Efficiency
Bottlenecks, excess motion, and unreliable equipment create operational inefficiencies. Inventory automation provides insights to optimize processes:
Identifying Weak Points
Understanding exactly where and how workflows are breaking down is crucial. Inventory management systems can collect important warehouse metrics like:
- Order processing times
- Picking and packing rates
- Inventory adjustments and errors
- Equipment downtime
- Returns and defects
Combining this data with process mining gives a detailed visualization of inefficiencies as they occur. For example, the biggest bottlenecks may happen during batch order picking and sorting.
Optimizing Processes
Once pain points are identified, businesses can streamline processes to eliminate waste. This may involve changes like:
- Automated picking directions to minimize travel distance
- Dynamic batching based on product locations
- Preventative maintenance for equipment
- Staff shift changes to match order volume peaks
- Inventory slotting optimization
Continuous monitoring ensures any regressions are quickly caught. Optimized processes significantly boost productivity and throughput.
Results from Efficiency Improvements
With deep inventory insights, leading companies have achieved major efficiency gains:
- Reduced warehouse picking time by 40%
- Cut order processing time from 60 mins to 20 mins
- Decreased out of stocks by over 50%
- Increased inventory count accuracy to 99%
Higher efficiency gets products out the door faster to customers. It also lowers operational costs through less labor, reduced defects, and avoidance of rush shipping fees.
5. Remote Warehouse Monitoring
Traditionally, managing distributed warehouses required managers on-site at each location. Inventory management automation now enables remote visibility and control:
Centralized Tracking
With sensors and software providing up-to-date inventory data in the cloud, all locations can be monitored remotely via a central dashboard.
Managers have complete visibility into stock levels, shipments, equipment statuses, worker productivity and more across every site. No manual gathering of reports and data is needed.
Reduced On-Site Presence
Remote monitoring enables managers to oversee warehouse operations without being physically present. Security systems provide 24/7 surveillance capabilities as well.
Having fewer managers on location slashes overhead costs. Sites can also operate round-the-clock without requiring an on-premises manager after typical working hours.
Enabling Multi-warehouse Management
As businesses expand into new geographical areas, distribution across multiple warehouses becomes necessary. This has traditionally imposed heavy oversight burdens.
With centralized data available remotely, managers can juggle numerous locations more effectively. They gain economies of scale without sacrificing granular visibility.
Research by Mordor Intelligence predicts remote warehouse monitoring will grow 19% CAGR through 2027 as omnichannel operations expand.
6. Automated Replenishment
Maintaining optimal inventory levels is vital to avoid stockouts. Automated reordering continuously maintains desired buffers:
Challenges of Manual Replenishment
Manually monitoring and replacing inventory is labor-intensive, inefficient, and prone to gaps or delays, leading to stockouts.
Out-of-stocks remain a chronic problem, with items out of stock an average 8% of the time according to IHL Group. For some verticals like groceries, this metric can be even higher.
Automated Reorder Triggers
Replenishment can be set to trigger automatically when certain conditions are met. Common approaches include:
- Ordering when stock hits predefined minimum levels
- Dynamic reordering factoring in demand projections and lead times
- Fixed interval reordering on set schedules
With automated systems continuously tracking inventory and sales in the background, replenishment happens seamlessly before shortages occur.
Keeping Shelves Stocked
Technologies like RFID shelf tags also enable automated store replenishment. Smart shelves detect when an item needs restocking and can automatically place warehouse orders.
Automated “store-friendly” pallets deliver mixed products on one pallet tailored to what that location needs. This simplifies and speeds replenishment.
Automation eliminates gaps from manual oversight, improving service levels. Out-of-stocks can decrease by up to 60%, according to Zebra Technologies.
With today’s customer expectations and fragile supply chains, inventory management matters more than ever. Automating forecasting, warehousing, planning, and fulfillment provides significant benefits:
- Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Smoother cash flow
- Higher forecast accuracy
- Increased operational efficiency
- Enabled remote monitoring
- Reliable automated replenishment
However, simply adding software is not enough. To realize these benefits, businesses need an end-to-end approach considering people, processes, data, and technologies.
Supply chain leaders should adopt an optimization mindset focused on creating agility, efficiency, and transparency across operations. With the right inventory management approach, businesses can achieve resilience and success.