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Managing your inventory is one of the most critical factors for any business dealing with physical goods. Manual methods of inventory management such as utilising spreadsheets can be proven to be inaccurate and time-consuming, which is one of the main reasons why businesses turn to ERP systems to effectively manage and optimise inventory level while maintaining data accuracy.

ERP system goes beyond merely managing stock quantities but also to expand to other key related areas such as financial impact of goods movement, procurement, order management and more. Here are the 5 benefits that an ERP can bring to you for your inventory management needs:

1. Gain Control and Visibility Across Multiple Locations

The inventory module in an ERP provides real time inventory visibility into stock levels across all locations, including warehouses, stores and goods in transit. ERP achieves this feat by recording and updating all inventory transactions in real time, whether through a direct user input, process automation or file exchange with other supporting systems.

It also allows you to set predefined parameters such as minimum stock levels to support inventory replenishment, or order allocation rule to automate order fulfilment. As a result, you can proactively monitor stock levels and sell-through, procuring inventory or transferring between locations as necessary to ensure inventory availability and minimise obsolete inventory.

2. Prevent Excess Inventory

Customer satisfaction and profitability require maintaining the right balance of stock levels to fulfil anticipated orders. Carry too much inventory and your capital is tied up in products that aren’t being sold. Moreover, there are costs to store and manage the inventory, particularly items with limited shelf life. However if carry too little, the business runs the risk of stock outs and an inability to meet customer demand.

With a modern inventory management system, particularly one that is integrated with the ERP software can help with forecasting and demand planning, ensuring that the perfect amount of inventory is kept on hand.

3. Automation in Cycle Counting

Using automation in your cycle counting process can improve the accuracy of your results. Automation also lowers staff costs, boosts worker productivity, provides trust in your stock levels and enables real-time visibility as your inventory changes.

By streamlining your inventory cycle count, you not only stand to eliminate the inventory costs associated with human error, but you can also benefit from further cost-savings.

4. Improve Customer Experience

As customers rely more and more on their smartphones to “window shop” for the products they’re looking for prior to visiting local stores to make their purchases. The need for an integrated inventory management system that constantly keeps websites up to date is more important than ever.

When customers are confident that the inventory items they see on a brand’s website are represented accurately, they’re more likely to visit their store and make a purchase. This can help to build trust and drive more foot traffic.

5. Facilitates Growth

Using an inventory management system, it enables you to easily plan for your growth and scale your business the right way. As your business develops, enters new markets, and diversifies its products, the system allows you to scale depending on your business needs. You can scale profitably without having to worry about spending on upgrades to your system.

Oracle NetSuite Cloud ERP

Oracle NetSuite Cloud ERP solution provides rich functionalities to manage inventories for many businesses, in order to make better and faster decisions. It allows you to highly control inventory including demand planning, procurement, fulfilment and finance in multiple locations from your favourite device in real time. Oracle NetSuite Cloud ERP also helps businesses to reduce errors and improve efficiency without wasting resources on manual reporting.

PointStar is a 5-Star Oracle NetSuite partner with extensive knowledge and experience in financial accounting/ERP and CRM solutions for small to mid-market and enterprise customers. Established in 2008, with offices in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh, our expertise ensures successful implementation of Oracle NetSuite Cloud ERP for more than 100 clients throughout the region.

To learn more about Oracle NetSuite Cloud ERP, please contact our Oracle NetSuite experts.

With the easing of the lockdowns and the economy in recovering mode, e-commerce has become increasingly important as many companies have been forced to completely revamp their online presence to adapt and foster direct relationships with their customers during this unprecedented time. 

However, the front-end e-commerce site is not the only area that businesses need to address. Dissociating the back-end systems such as finance, order and inventory management systems while operating an e-commerce site can increase inefficiency. Manually entering data from online orders or batch importing can cause delays and errors. These order and inventory issues create dissatisfied shopping experiences such as shipping delays or items being out of stock, which subsequently lead to lower conversion and retention rates.

Some businesses attempt to bridge these disconnected systems by relying on third-party tools to process data exchanges. It’s often unreliable and requires ongoing fees and maintenance for such as integrations, add-on applications, extensions and payment gateways. These factors can reduce productivity and increase inefficiencies.

Here are some common aspects of e-commerce challenges:

Engaging Experiences

In order to attract new visitors and convert website traffic into sales, businesses need to deliver relevant and engaging shopping experiences. Getting first-time purchasers to make their second purchase requires businesses to provide value beyond the initial transaction.

Although gaining new customers is important, growing customer loyalty and lifetime value are also crucial to the long-term health of a business. Businesses need to drive shoppers back to their website, by not only relying on the quality of products but also finding ways to increase average order values and frequency of purchase.

Inventory Insights

Providing a positive online shopping experience without considering whether inventory is available to ship can impact on shopping experiences that affects the brand value and trust. Not being able to display stock availability on your website, shoppers will not be able to make informed purchasing decisions. Furthermore, without these insights, inventory managers won’t be able to make distribution adjustments to maintain inventory level which can result in lost sales. While at the same time, when businesses overstock popular products to keep up with demand, they will hurt their cash flow and risk being stuck with excess inventory.

Order Management

A company without a single platform to manage all orders coming from various channels will face a challenge to fulfil orders in an effective and efficient manner. The delay in processing and shipping out the orders will impact on the customer satisfaction level, especially if the customer can quickly shift to different brands or sellers. Additionally, customers mostly will not tolerate any order inaccuracy. Therefore, it is important to provide them with the best shopping experience to retain their loyalty to your brand.

An order management system unified with e-commerce, inventory and finance can increase customer satisfaction, decrease labour and shipping costs and increase profit margins.

Unifying E-commerce with Your Business Systems

It’s difficult to get a full understanding of your customers’ interactions and behaviour when your customer, order, inventory and financial data are stored in separate, channel-specific silos. The manual works to replicate data sources of orders, product information and pricing in your e-commerce solution and business systems are ineffective and can cause errors.

When e-commerce is unified with ERP, CRM, order and inventory management, businesses will be able to gain real-time visibility into every aspect of their business. Integration between front-end e-commerce system and back-end business systems are no longer needed. All systems will work seamlessly together and, organisations do not need to manage separate systems and key in data manually

Oracle NetSuite SuiteCommerce

Oracle NetSuite’s e-commerce solution, SuiteCommerce, is natively unified with NetSuite business applications, enabling companies to manage their entire business with a single solution. It provides a single source of customer, order and inventory data providing unprecedented, real-time visibility across organisation to make informed timely business decisions.

SuiteCommerce also has access to any data or field stored in Oracle NetSuite back office in real-time and provides a complete view of your customers’ activity and experiences. By housing operations under one unified system, organisations see a lower total cost of ownership than other disparate solutions.