Picture your supply chain as a delicate musical composition, where inventory acts as the notes that require perfect timing. But if someone plays the wrong notes or the instruments aren’t tuned properly, the outcome can quickly turn the music you enjoy into something you dread.
Similarly, inventory errors or lack of connection to the rest of your business can turn the business you love into a source of stress.
For product sellers, efficient inventory management is the unsung conductor required for long-term success. It’s akin to creating a well-orchestrated symphony where every instrument plays its part seamlessly.
But, let any inefficiency sneak in, and it’ll jeopardize the entire performance. The consequences are far-reaching, too, from excess stock creating financial strain to stockouts resulting in dissatisfied customers — both of which can get in the way of your company’s growth.
Let’s take a closer look at what inventory inefficiency looks like, how it impacts your business, and how you can orchestrate a seamless inventory experience with Cin7’s Connected Inventory Performance.
Inventory inefficiency refers to inventory management that relies heavily on manual workflows and lacks real-time visibility into stock levels. If you aren’t actively monitoring and managing how inventory flows through your entire business, it’s inefficient.
Inefficient inventory management can lead to issues like understocking, overstocking, negative customer experiences, and lost sales. For instance, take manual approvals. If someone has to approve an incoming shipment from a supplier and that task sits on their desk for a few days, your shelves will remain empty, and you’ll miss out on potential sales.
These issues make it difficult to plan ahead and coordinate all the parts of your operations seamlessly. After all, business owners don’t have accurate insights into how much product they have or should have on hand without effective inventory management.
Inventory inefficiency is the biggest obstacle product sellers face when trying to scale their business. If you can’t streamline inventory, any growth you experience can lead to high operational burdens, increasing expenses and decreasing cash flow.
Inventory mismanagement can impact your business in several ways, making it difficult to keep up with work and focus on growth. If any of these issues resonate with you, it’s a sign that you may be struggling with inventory inefficiency.
As you grow and bring in new customers, managing your inventory becomes a full-time job. Soon, you’re so busy working for your business that you don’t have time to work on it.
Instead of thinking of ways to take advantage of new growth opportunities, you fill your weekdays, and likely weekends, with manual inventory work. That can look like updating spreadsheets, processing orders manually, and constantly counting inventory to determine how much product you have.
Besides manual overload, inventory inefficiency leads to a severe lack of visibility. Without real-time inventory tracking and accurate data on stock levels, it feels as if you’re driving blind and don’t have the data you need to make better business decisions.
Low visibility can also make it difficult to forecast demand in busy seasons when it’s more volatile and unpredictable, and the stakes of stockouts are higher.
If you want to improve your inventory control and the quality of your reporting, having live and accurate data is essential. Up to 77% of supply chain professionals list real-time visibility as a must-have, and for good reason.
Without visibility, your reporting is limited and slow, and you don’t have a clear grasp of information on key business operations, including SKU performance, supply, or demand.
Inventory inefficiency leads to a higher rate of mistakes like understocking, overstocking, and product obsolescence. Besides these, businesses can also experience supply chain issues like long lead times, lost inventory, and erroneous shipments.
Often, these errors are difficult to catch on the spot, meaning that by the time you finally get to identify the errors and address them, you’ve already lost out on sales or turned customers away with a negative experience.
Recurring errors force you to invest time and money into fixing mistakes instead of keeping customers happy and expanding into new growth areas. In other words, all your energy will go toward staying afloat.
Lack of inventory control doesn’t just impact your time; it can also lead to unnecessary difficulties with working capital. Early supplier payments, poor inventory turnover, and long customer billing cycles impact cash flow negatively.
Inaccurate demand forecasts can also cause issues. For instance, by having excess inventory, you’re essentially tying up your capital to unsold products. Conversely, product shortages can result in missed sales, reducing the cash coming into your business.As expense increases due to inflation and supply chain disruptions continue to challenge sellers, product sellers need solutions that let them operate more efficiently and increase working capital. With 79% of supply chain professionals concerned about future rises in supply prices, the margin of error is especially tight, and you don’t want inefficient processes to be the reason you can’t keep the lights on.
Expanding your business can be a painful and complex process when you have poor inventory management. Whether growing through new sales channels, adding SKUs, or expanding to new regions, more growth almost always equals more work.
For example, increases in sales volume won’t propel your business forward. Instead, the additional orders will increase your operational burden, and you’ll feel buried under the work of managing inventory and processing orders.
Not to mention, without effective inventory management, companies often need to hire more people to keep up with the additional work that comes with sales growth. In contrast, an efficient inventory management system that’s well-connected with the rest of your business lets you automate time-intensive tasks, enabling you to scale without increasing headcount.
Inaccurate inventory data can lead to incorrect availability information or stockouts, which hurts the buyer experience. The data backs that up, with a study showing that 40% of e-commerce customers have gone to competitors because their preferred brand didn’t have the item they wanted in stock.
Moreover, manual processes can lead to late or missing orders, which makes building trust and earning loyal customers difficult.
Unfortunately, customers don’t always give brands a second chance. If competitors can provide a better experience than you, winning the people you lost due to poor customer experiences will be challenging.
Inefficient inventory doesn’t just eat into profit. It takes over your time and makes growth seem impossible. At Cin7, helping product sellers take control of their inventory is the reason we wake up in the morning. We want to help brands take the pain out of inventory management so they can scale, reach their full potential, and fulfill their dreams.
Our Connected Inventory Performance empowers businesses to eradicate inefficiencies by giving them real-time visibility into stock levels and creating a connected business that’s easier to manage and scale.
By using Cin7 to plug inventory into the rest of your business, you drive visibility, traceability, and efficiency across your entire inventory lifecycle. As a result, you can stop working for your business and start working on it.
Here are the ways your business can benefit from Connected Inventory Performance.
Using Cin7 for inventory tracking gives you a clear view of your stock levels, product life cycle, and supply chain in real time. Cin7’s inventory management software shows you each component and product as it moves through inventory.
With this level of visibility into your operations, you can make better data-driven decisions with insights into supplier costs, SKU performance, and more accurate customer demand forecasting.
And if there are any errors, you can spot and address them immediately instead of having them catch you by surprise months down the road.
Cin7 helps you save hours of work every week by automating inventory workflows throughout the entire product life cycle, from procurement and order management to storage and fulfillment.
Once you’re free from working for your business, you can focus on building your bottom line and finding the right growth strategy.
With the right inventory management practices and software in place, business growth doesn’t have to be expensive. When you use Cin7 to get full visibility into your inventory lifecycle and automate workflows, it’s easy to keep inventory costs under control.
Real-time data on inventory levels means you’re using accurate information to place purchase orders and predict demand. That lets you take advantage of strategies like just-in-time inventory, which helps you avoid overstocking and keeps warehousing and carrying costs low.
With over 700 integrations, you can turn Cin7 into your business’s central hub and connect it seamlessly with other business functions — from sales channels to accounting software.
Cin7’s smooth integrations empower you to sell more and reach customers where they are by making it easy to plug into new sales channels, marketplaces, sale and shipping methods (e.g., 3PL, WMS, POS), and regions.
Modern inventory management systems like Cin7 help you future-proof your business by building supply chain resilience. Let’s face it — you can’t control the external events that impact your business.
With Cin7, you can rest assured knowing you have a powerful, flexible, and reliable inventory management system that keeps your business agile. Our Connected Inventory Performance enables you to adapt to changing external factors and better withstand supply chain disruptions that could easily overwhelm small businesses relying on manual workflows.
When you enable Connected Inventory Performance with Cin7, you take the pain out of scaling your business. Automating manual workflows means you can handle an increase in sales volume without needing to increase headcount or spend all of your time tracking inventory.
Cin7 grows with you. As you expand your business, you can tailor Cin7 to your unique needs, including support for complex workflows like EDI and 3PL.
For product sellers, unchecked inventory inefficiency can lead to a domino effect of negative consequences that are hard to come back from. When you don’t have effective inventory processes, you end up falling into the trap of working for your business instead of working on it.
With Cin7’s inventory management system, you can enable Connected Inventory Performance and turn your operations into a competitive advantage that lets you build an agile and streamlined business that can scale without growing pains.
If you’re ready to stop inefficiency, request a demo today and see how Cin7 empowers you to regain control over your business.
