Picture it: Shelves are always stocked, customers are consistently satisfied, and the bottom line is strong. That’s the power of effective inventory management.
Achieving this goal in brick-and-mortar retail isn’t without challenges. Brick-and-mortar retailers are tasked with navigating fluctuating sell-through rates, overstock, and dead stock—issues that drive up costs, create inefficiencies, and threaten profitability. However, by aligning inventory with demand and managing stock levels, retailers can streamline operations, reduce costs, and enhance the shopping experience.
Below, we’ll explore essential inventory management techniques that empower large brick-and-mortar retailers to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
The Role of Technology in Inventory Management
Technology plays a significant role in modern inventory management, optimizing stock levels more accurately and efficiently. With this in mind, retailers are adopting advanced tools such as:
Real-Time Data Analytics
Real-time data analytics, powered by RFID and AI, allow for precise inventory tracking across locations and throughout the supply chain. Ensuring this level of accuracy minimizes stockouts, overstock, and the need for manual inventory counting.
Automated Replenishment
Predictive analytics and AI forecast demand, enabling timely stock replenishment with little-to-no manual work required. This approach allows retailers to predict and automatically reorder products before inventory levels become critically low, reducing lost sales and maintaining customer satisfaction.
Omnichannel Visibility
Consistent inventory data across both online and offline channels is essential in today’s omnichannel environment. Technology enables a unified view of inventory across all sales channels, ensuring customers can trust product availability regardless of their purchasing method. For example, software can help support seamless experiences such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) and ship-from-store options.
Inventory Management Techniques for Retailers
Several approaches can help retailers reduce costs and improve efficiency at both the store level and headquarters. Consider trying the following inventory management techniques:
1. Optimizing Inventory Levels
Maintaining optimal inventory levels is a must in order to minimize costs and avoid the common pitfalls of overstocking or understocking. Demand forecasting is central to this process, allowing retailers to predict product demand accurately by specific locations. By analyzing historical sales data, market trends, and seasonal patterns, retailers can establish the right inventory levels for each product.
ABC analysis is an effective method for categorizing inventory based on its value to the business. By prioritizing high-value items (Category A) and closely monitoring their stock levels, retailers can ensure key products are always available, while also managing resources as efficiently as possible.
Replenishment planning is another key aspect of inventory optimization. Practices such as just-in-time (JIT) inventory and setting minimum stock levels enable retailers to maintain lean inventory while ensuring products are reordered in time to meet demand.
2. Streamlining Operations
Efficiency is the key to successful inventory management. To streamline operations, retailers must continuously identify and eliminate inefficiencies in their inventory processes. Automating routine tasks such as reordering and stock tracking can reduce overhead costs and free up resources for more strategic initiatives.
Additionally, automated inventory management systems enhance accuracy and reduce the level of effort (LOE) for both store staff and HQ. This technique leads to faster decision-making and a more agile operation that quickly adapts to changing market conditions and consumer preferences.
RFID can also help manage inventory between front and back of house. Store staff can get notifications when inventory is running low on the sales floor and have an accurate view of what product is available in stockrooms that can be brought forward to fill empty shelves.
3. Preventing Dead Stock
Dead stock is a significant drain on profitability, adding to unsellable inventory that will most likely be significantly marked down. To prevent markdowns and financial losses, retailers should consider adopting a first-in, first-out (FIFO) approach, ensuring older stock is sold before newer items to reduce the risk of obsolescence.
Aligning inventory with seasonal trends and demand cycles is equally important. Retailers should adjust their stock levels and product assortments based on expected demand, using promotions and discounts to strategically move excess inventory before it becomes dead stock.
4. Localizing Inventory
Tailoring inventory to match regional customer preferences is a powerful strategy for reducing costs and enhancing customer satisfaction. Store-specific assortment planning allows retailers to optimize inventory for local demand, ensuring each store carries the products most likely to sell in that area. Take winter coats, scarves, and hats for example: Products like these are unlikely to sell in beach towns with warm climates.
Data analytics can further refine localization, providing insights into regional buying patterns and preferences. By localizing inventory, retailers can avoid the costs associated with carrying unsellable stock and increase sales by offering the right products in the right locations.
Enhancing Inventory Management with OR
Optimum Retailing’s in-store experience management solution makes inventory management effortless. Powerful, AI-driven solutions and automation capabilities are transformative for large brick-and-mortar retailers looking for techniques and technology that take inventory management from so-so to successful.
RFID Tracking
AI-powered RFID tracking enables retailers to track and locate store products in near real-time with 99 percent accuracy. With OR’s RFID solution at their disposal, both store teams and HQ can identify exactly where products are in the store, plus whether they’re stocked in the right place.
Realgram
Realgram makes it possible to create store-specific planograms based on each store’s available inventory. Using Realgram, retailers can not only verify store compliance (since they aren't receiving planograms for products they don't have on hand) but also provide store teams with recommendations on alternative products when inventory levels drop.
Data and Analytics
Demand forecasting and data profiling using in-store data help teams improve operations, localization, and sales by ensuring the right products are stocked at the right locations, based on regional needs and preferences.
Ready to start deploying new inventory management techniques? Schedule a demo to get an up-close look at OR’s innovative solutions.
