Calibrating sales ideas using retail software

Analysis is the first step to greatness

Retailers are putting more stress on finding simplified ways to manage, operate and control their retail business with ease. These growing companies need the right kind of retail software system to cut down their work load. Retail software helps adapting sales ideas of the retailer such as easy changes in pricing during particular season and discount strategies to compete with the deals offered by the competitors.

This is massively helped by having flexible analysis and reporting tools. The software should provide the maximum flexibility in this area. Report designing,Pivoting, Dashboards, Custom Dashboards, Security of Reports, Mass report allocation to stores, graphical and chart based reports all of this should be achievable with great retail software. Moreover the reports could be pulled from all parts of the system to present an integrated and comprehensive picture.

Seeing reports like daily sales summary, inventory movement, sales vs stock, sales /sq ft, sales of X vs Y over a certain period, stock ageing, discount analysis,promotion sales, salesman reports and many more automatically everyday should be simple.

There are many more features that could be important but as far as a retail ERP is considered, this is something that is foremost because usually one buys software to see reports.

Inventory control is a necessity

Not even a single retail supply chain owner can afford to overlook the importance of inventory management software, so in order to provide on-time deliveries and avoid out of stock problems inventory software helps to scale up the operations.

Keeping track of inventory in real-time is becoming essential these days with fast growing business which are typically not owner managed. This challenge is met with real-time inventory management software.

It gives us a system which can control dead stock, running stock, minimum quantity, reorder quantity, replenishment quantity and other inventory parameters. Through this, business owners would get a clearer grasp on which products sell and when it sells, which products do not sell at all, which products do better in one store and not on other stores. With the centralized approach, we can even better manage and update off-the-shelf and on-the-shelf products by making use of inventory software.

The implementation of retail inventory software in FMCG industry or in any wholesale store would increase the chances of achieving greater profits as one will get an idea on their consumers' buying behaviour and knowing all these would get to spend ones investment wisely by re-stocking on products that sell especially during the peak seasons, it helps to stop investing on products that do not sell at all and get to move around products that do not sell in one area to another area where it sells. It also helps us to transfer stock from one store to another on a go. In addition it acts as a real time tool to provide quick answers when it comes to measuring stock or auditing it. On the whole it can be considered the core software to get implemented to accelerate seamless stock management at a wholesale or retail store.

About Author

The author, Rohit Khetan, is VP Marketing at Ginesys which has over a decade experience in providing software solutions from procurement to point of sale.