Are you one of the 90% of organizations still relying on spreadsheets to track and reorder inventory? If so, it’s completely understandable. Spreadsheets are easy to use, affordable, and help you easily store, organize, and analyze essential inventory data.
But there are downsides to using these ubiquitous data tools to manage your inventory. Today, we’ll look at these downsides and dive into how an AI-driven reordering solution, like Cin7’s ForesightAI, can help you break free from your spreadsheets once and for all.
Spreadsheets have been the go-to format for visualizing business-wide data since 1969. Yet, for all their versatility, spreadsheets have more than a few costly drawbacks.
A prime example is their inability to scale. When businesses grow, they naturally produce more data, but your spreadsheets can’t handle the amount or complexity of information coming their way. Where once you could easily and manually manage your inventory of 50 SKUs, 500 SKUs will push your spreadsheets’ capabilities to their limits.
More channels, suppliers, and variables turn spreadsheets into a glorified data organizer at best and a fragile guessing machine at worst. Unfortunately, when it comes to ordering inventory, guessing just doesn’t cut it.
To stock your warehouse optimally (e.g., you have enough product to fulfill orders but not so much that you can’t get rid of the extras), you require updated data that reflects real demand. Spreadsheets only offer static data displayed as a snapshot in time, so when you’re manually reordering your inventory via spreadsheets, you’re increasing operational risk.
This risk can include human error, outdated formulas, and version control issues. All of these create blind spots across purchasing and planning. Guessing what you need and when you need it is a recipe for disaster. Stockouts mean missed revenue and unhappy customers, while over-ordering quietly drains your cash, takes up valuable storage space, and reduces your margins.
Bottom line? Inventory guesswork can hide its cost until it’s almost too late. Fortunately, it’s not too late to invest in Cin7’s AI-driven demand planning and reordering tool, ForesightAI, that acts as your very own (and very accurate) inventory crystal ball.
In our recent post on doing demand forecasting manually, we unpack demand forecasting, provide steps for how to do demand forecasting manually, and explore when it might be time to introduce AI into the picture. We also explain where manual forecasting can go wrong.
With an AI-powered forecasting tool like ForesightAI, these and other challenges associated with manual inventory ordering are alleviated. Smart reordering replaces assumptions with signals. Specifically, AI-driven reordering analyzes historical sales, demand patterns, and lead times to recommend when and how much to reorder.
Your gut feelings? They’re replaced with facts.
Cin7’s ForesightAI brings intelligence into everyday decisions. It continuously learns from real sales and inventory data inside Cin7, helping SMBs make confident reorder decisions without manual forecasting gymnastics. Plus, better, more accurate replenishment improves more than inventory.
It supports:
Who doesn’t want more money in their pocket, happier suppliers, and less daily stress? No one we know!
Transforming the spreadsheet mindset (“this is the way we’ve always managed our inventory”) to an automated, AI-powered solution mindset (“this is the way we’re going to make inventory reordering easy and successful”) can be challenging, but just because something is hard doesn’t make it not doable.
Moving off spreadsheets is about more than trading in spreadsheets for software. It’s about trading gut feelings for clarity and letting smarter systems do the heavy lifting. In this case, the heavy lifting by Cin7 and ForesightAI looks like predicting demand 24 months ahead, automating your reordering, eliminating costly stockouts, optimizing warehouse space, and freeing up capital to grow your business.
For Cin7 customer HairCo, Cin7 was the answer to their inventory issue. Their issue? The fact that their inventory was, according to General Manager Dion Alessi, “never really accurate.”
Even worse, forecasting was a time-consuming, Excel-based task. Thankfully, ForesightAI did the trick. “I was pulling my hair out before,” Dion says. “With Cin7’s ForesightAI, the forecasts are all there with a couple clicks of a button. It changed my life.”
The life-changing results included being able to predict inventory needs three to six months in advance, accounting for lead times, minimum order quantities, and past sales data. And after following ForesightAI’s recommendations for three short months, HairCo saw a 10% increase in sales.
As a growing SMB, you can experience the same amazing benefits. AI-driven reordering is the next step in your evolution, and ForesightAI, which is grounded in everyday data, will help you make future-forward decisions.
Check out our interactive demo and learn more about how utilizing Cin7 and ForesightAI could be a difference maker for you!