How Inventory Dashboards Enhance Visibility and Profitability

Due to continued supply chain disruptions and rising prices, many business leaders focus on inventory management and understand the impact of excess inventory and lack of cash flow and profitability.

You might be able to purchase a basic inventory management system if your needs are minimal.  Businesses risk the following if they do not have a management system in place to manage their inventory on a large scale: 

1. Incompetent Inventory Management: 

There are too many items in one location, while others are out of stock. It is a classic issue that arises when you cannot see both overall inventory levels across multiple sites and profitable move inventory moves between sites. You risk missing out on sales while incurring higher storage and handling costs. 

2. Increased Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): 

When each site must order in order to provide sufficient stock levels and manage replenishment in a vacuum, you end up purchasing and carrying more inventory overall, reducing profits. 

3. Lost sales, decreased customer satisfaction: 

When a customer returns an item purchased at the store, the seller can exchange the undesired item for the right size or similar product. However, without inventory tracking across all places, the associate is unable to offer the consumer the option of picking up a replacement item or having it shipped. 

4. Over shipping:  

Orders may be fulfilled from distant locations if the ability to specify where products are shipped from is not available. With shipping costs soaring, it would be a great benefit to locate the nearest warehouse or scale to avoid multiple shipments resulting in excessive costs. 

With real-time data visibility, businesses can eliminate all these issues and optimize inventory throughout locations, successfully manage inventory and satisfy customers. The inventory dashboard provides a quick, instant aggregation of reports, searches, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and metrics that make sense for your business.  

The dedicated dashboard customizes this data, providing key stakeholders with a snapshot of your inventory tailored to their needs. 

Key-Role Specific Dashboards 

Chief Financial Officer (CFO Dashboards): At the executive level, dashboards provide high-level understanding of key KPIs such as inventory values, operating cash flow, and cost of goods sold. 

Purchasing Agent: Dashboards designed for specific functional roles such as purchasing manager provide a centralized location for managing day-to-day tasks such as monitoring open orders, rearranging points, and distributors. 

Inventory/ Warehouse Management: The warehouse management dashboard is central to understanding and optimizing inventory usage across the company, a warehouse manager dashboard gives warehouse or inventory manager with important details into fulfillment, inventory allocation, and in-transit inventory. 

Six Ways to make your Dashboard Profitable: 

1. Maximize sales and minimize out-of-stock.

NetSuite allows you to set up all of your sites as locations, giving you a true company-wide view of inventory. 

2. Actively monitor and stabilize inventory levels.

You can guarantee availability and reduce old inventory by easily and effectively transferring inventory between locations.

3. Reduce inventory requirements. 

If you implement a cross channel fulfillment strategy and can easily place orders in your online store, you can maximize the value of your location and avoid overstocking. 

4. Gather useful information

Buyers and other decision-makers can use dashboards to monitor and grasp regional and seasonal trends. 

5. Create fulfillment rules based on pre-defined criteria.

You can avoid several shipments in a single order and increase shipping costs by considering criteria such as full order inventory availability and location. 

6. Saving sales in out-of-stock market. 

With access to company-wide inventory status, sales reps can transfer, hold, or ship items directly to their customers. 

Meet our experts at Jobin & Jismi to know more about inventory dashboard.