Inventory Optimization for Retail

Retail establishments survive and thrive by profiting from their services. However, profit means more than simply earning more money than what was put into each product. Watch the video below as Tim explains how to get the best inventory optimization for your retail establishment using our retail POS system.

Having a profitable business means knowing how to manage products that you have in stock so that income is not wasted on items that cannot be used. Inventory optimization is a move that every business must make in order to succeed.

What is Inventory Optimization?

Simply put, inventory optimization is the process of balancing your inventory with your company’s needs. Having the right retail POS system in place is vital for effective retail inventory optimization.

How is Stock Merchandise Typically Managed?

You might be wondering, what should you consider first for the inventory optimization of your retail store? In many instances, a manager either manually orders new stock or sets up an automated ordering system. This is generally done one of three ways:

– Stock is ordered by looking at the shelves and determining the correct number to refill the shelf.

– Stock is replaced as orders dip below a certain “Par” level.

– Stock is ordered in pre-established quantities on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

– Stock is ordered and replaced as items are sold.

These methods of ordering are problematic for a variety of reasons. Waiting until stock is too low can cause the product to sell out of stock, which costs businesses money in lost sales. Stock that is automatically ordered, whether on a timetable or per sale, can lead to a surplus. Having too much merchandise in stock wastes money on extra stock and often leads to products that need to be placed on clearance or use up valuable space on the shelf. The best way to fix this problem is to avoid it from the outset. A reliable retail POS system will help in this regard.

How Can Bepoz Help?

Bepoz is a system that perfects inventory optimization for retail. Bepoz knows how much inventory you have in stock, how quickly or slowly specific items are sold, and how many of each need to be re-ordered. Bepoz removes the likelihood of human error by automatically calculating how much stock needs to be re-ordered.

Using Bepoz has been shown to increase the value of items you have in stock by 20-30 percent. It has been historically proven to produce savings of up to 50 percent in some cases. In fact, Bepoz does such an excellent job of optimizing inventory that it pays for itself after only a short amount of time in use. In addition, Bepoz offers inventory optimization for retail along with a wide array of point-of-sale services.

To learn more about optimizing retail inventory and what we can do for your company, give us a call.

Learn More:

5 Features Every Retail POS System Should Have

5 Simple Steps to Choosing the Best Inventory Management Software

5 Ways to Manage Inventory with a POS System

Video Transcript

Hey, this is Tim with Bepoz Enterprise Point of Sale Systems. In this video, we’re going to talk about features, key features that Bepoz has, to help you optimize your inventory. It is important to note that we don’t know of any other vendor in our price point that has any features that even get close to these. And it’s important to note that because these features have huge value propositions for your business, and can make a point of sale system pay for itself incredibly fast.

So this could be used in both foodservice environments and in retail environments, anywhere where you’re tracking inventory. So when you’re tracking inventory, there are many different ways to reorder. And Bepoz can support almost every method that you could think of to reorder.

If you wanted to reorder your products, you could go in and just manually tell the system that I got some new products in, and I say I got five of this, 10 of this, 15 of that. Bepoz can do that. You could also walk down the shelf and say, and say, or when the products come in, I could have a handheld inventory unit, and I could scan the things that I got five of those, 10 of those, 15 of those. And when I scan the barcode, the barcode could know whether it was a case or a single. So if I scan the case, it would know that there’s 24 in the case, for instance, and it counts all 24 in the case. So Bepoz can handle inventory. That way I could receive inventory by scanning with a barcode.

It is also possible for Bepoz to manage purchasing. So I could actually use Bepoz to send purchase orders off to vendors, and tell them what I want. So if I’m creating a purchase order, I can do that several different ways. And there’s tried and true methods that are out in the marketplace in many different systems. You could oftentimes just manually build the purchase order, and say I want five of these. I could look at the shelf and say I want five of these because I have five on the shelf. But if I do that, do I really know how many we’re selling. Five more on the shelf may be six months’ worth of inventory, and I buy weekly on the product. Do I need six months’ worth of inventory? Probably I don’t. If I’m buying weekly, I only need weekly inventory. I probably need one week’s worth of inventory and maybe two as a maximum. So I keep this buffer between one and two weeks of inventory if I buy weekly. So it’s important to know that many systems wouldn’t be able to support helping you do that.

Now some systems would say, well when I create a purchase order to buy from my outside vendor, I just want to reorder what I sold in the last week. The problem with this method is, what happens if you ran out of that product before this week started. In this week that I’m reporting from, I never sold any. So if I never sold any, and it reorders what I sold, and I never sold it, it won’t order it again. The other problem with ordering what you sold during said time period is, what happens if you have ten times too much inventory on the shelf, and I sold one-tenth of it during the time period. So the system said, well you sold 10 of these, go ahead and order 10 more. But I already have 10 times too much inventory on the shelf. I really shouldn’t be buying more. So in that process, that also can cause problems.

Another method for doing reoders is min/max levels. I can take par levels. So I say when you get below the minimum amount, whatever you set the minimum amount to be. Let’s say I set the minimum amount to be 10. Reorder back up to the maximum amount. Let’s say it’s 30. So if I get down to nine, the system will try to order 21 more. Now, if I order in cases, sometimes some retail POS systems will be able to do that, and others wouldn’t. Bepoz would be able to know that because you ordered those cases of 10 each, that I can only order two cases. And that the vendor doesn’t sell singles, so I have to buy two cases which will get me up to 29, not all the way to 30. But that’s as close as I can get using min/max levels.

However, if you have thousands of products, maybe even hundreds of products, min/max levels has a shortcoming too. If you use min/max levels, you have hundreds or thousands of min/max levels to be managed.

Let’s say some product slows down and stops selling as well as it used to in the past, or speeds up and starts selling faster than it used to in the past. If I use min/max levels, I need to adjust those min/max levels or I’ll be over-ordering the product, or under-ordering the product. So it’s important to note that min/max levels, although they can speed up the process of making orders doesn’t necessarily fix inaccuracies unless you keep up with min/max.

So I said all that to say that Bepoz has a fix for all of these. So Bepoz can automatically adjust your min/max levels using your sales history so that it knows exactly how many you sell a day, how many you should need, and make orders that are the right size. And make better decisions than any human can make on many products. Now if you have 30 products, probably this system isn’t very good for you. But if you’ve got 500 or 1,000 products or 10,000 or 50,000 products, we’re going to make far superior decisions for you. And what we’ve seen in the past is 20-30% savings of inventory value on the shelf while at the same time increasing the sales that you’re making because we make sure that you have better products on the shelf, and you’re not missing sales. And we have seen cases of up to 50% savings of inventory while at the time increasing the amount of sales. In fact, that case study for 50% savings was on a store that had a million dollars worth of inventory. And we could save them $500,000 worth of inventory while at the same time increasing the sales that they’re making on a weekly basis.

So this process and this retail POS system has huge value for your organization and can help pay for your system extremely quickly. So if you’re looking for a point of sale system that will help you track and manage and reorder inventory, you should talk to us. We’d love to talk to you about that. You can do so by calling the number at the top of the page or clicking the link below to schedule a meeting.