Getting an accurate and optimized inventory system in a retail and e-tail business is a tough job in the entire operation process as these two businesses are inventory-intensive businesses. Compliant Retail ERP software not only automates a retail business but also can help in many ways to grow a retailer or an e-tailer. And one of the most important factors is optimizing the Inventory. If the following 4 simple key things are checked on auto-pilot mode by your ERP system, then rest assured that your retail inventory can be rightly optimized.

• Alert for non-moving stock and ways to liquidate
• Ways to set benchmarks for category-wise inventory turnover (Will explain in an upcoming article)
• Alerts to avoid stock dumping by suppliers (Will explain in an upcoming article)
• Alerts to corner the low-performing suppliers (Will explain in an upcoming article)

1. Alert for non-moving stock and ways to liquidate (Explained)
Before liquidating no-moving stock, the first thing your ERP should give you is an automated periodical Stock Aging Report. Such a report will help you identify the stock laying unsold for more than 30 days, 60 days and 90 days, and so on… If you look at row no 5 carefully you will find that even though Item Five is only 5% of the entire stock which is lying unsold in your store but value wise it is 30%. And that is criminality for your business; this is insanely blocking your working capital: the real money, real profit margin, and that too for 6 months.

Since you know which items are no-moving, your ERP should have the option to take action on particular items on an immediate basis. Next step is to liquidate the no-moving stock 90-120+ stock needs to be acted upon quickly and prevented from going to dead stock. If your ERP system has the option that will help to do this seamlessly

• By generating new barcode sequences for old stocks for easy identification.
• By applying offers and schemes for offline stores and your online stores (but of course by protecting the cost of purchase of the items).
• By rotating those stocks between your physical stores serving different customer segments.
• CRM module should auto-fire the campaign to the online customer by auto-checking the customer persona.
• By prominently displaying the Old Stock being sold at a discount.
• By incentivizing your salesperson to clear old stock in that particular month.

I will share more insights on Optimizing your Retail Store or E-tail Store Inventory in next 3 articles. Please share your valuable feedback on my newly created newsletter on retail and retail technology to correct me and encourage me.

Thank you…
Happy Retailing…