Tuesday 19 August 2014

How To Reduce Retail Inventory Shrinkage

Inventory shrinkage includes theft by employees, visitors, administrative and paperwork errors, and other vendor issues. If considered, employee theft is the single biggest contributor which is difficult to track and the retail industry lose millions of dollars every year due to this.

In order to reduce shrinkage, the best way is to create a comprehensive strategy that includes people, processes, and technologies. This can be done through applications developed by IT consulting companies. These solutions help the retailers in gaining a clear visibility of the data to study the shrink causes. This accurate data can be used as a guideline or acts as an actionable information to help in making the right decisions.

RFID tags, and robust software combine to give you an effective method for more accurate tracking of the inventory. The RFID tags will allow you to precisely track the time and date of an item process, its removal from the case, the employee responsible for it, or if the item was purchased or returned by the customer.

Stock spoilage is another reason responsible for this shrinkage problem. As a solution to this, you can invest in a predictive software developed by a top-hand software development company that bases the orders on expected demand and replenishes stores closer to consumer purchase dates.

Also, lack of timely alert on low inventory levels or of the products that are about to expire is also responsible for inventory shrinkage. The inventory management system sends automatic alerts when inventory levels are low or the stock is near expiry or products are due to be shipped. This enables the inventory managers to make more timely and intelligent decisions to avoid future loss.

Moving from a manual, disjointed shrink-reduction program to an integrated strategy through inventory management system can increase the efficiency of the staff.

The above steps to reduce inventory shrinkage will offer the following operational benefits.

  • Achieve greater operational efficiency 
  • Get real-time insights on a mobile platform 
  • Streamline operations such as creating purchase orders, managing inventory and customer engagement
  • Improve customer service
  • Clear out the inventory of short-life date 
  • Enabling the customer to build a single item, customer and inventory view

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