How To Scale Your Business with Inventory and Order Management Software

People often conflate order management and inventory management. Order management refers to the customer-focused side of fulfilling an order, from the earliest stages of customer order placement to successfully delivering your order. In comparison, inventory management refers to the internal process of ordering, storing, using, and selling a business’ inventory. Let’s take a look at how each process supports each other and how you can successfully manage the two.

Spreadsheets Vs IMS

What does inventory and order management look like in Excel? Many SMEs rely on spreadsheets to manage their orders and inventory. However, spreadsheets can be time consuming, impractical, and stressful to use. In addition, they only offer basic capabilities and don’t provide the automation, efficiency-boosting capabilities, and scalability that an IMS offers. 

Spreadsheets must be constantly manually updated to ensure accuracy, eating into employees' time and leading to a higher number of mistakes due to human error. This can easily lead to overselling or stockouts. In addition, due to the need for manual updates, spreadsheets fail to deliver real-time visibility, making it hard to get an accurate, up-to-the-minute look at your stock levels across different locations or sales channels. 

In contrast, an Inventory Management System (IMS), especially when integrated within an Order Management System (OMS), automates these processes and offers accurate real-time inventory counts. This helps ensure accuracy, reduces the load on your teams, and cuts back on human error, making an inventory order management system a great choice for seamless stock and order management. 

How The Two Go Hand in Hand

Order Management (OM) and Inventory Management (IM) work in tandem when integrated within a single, cohesive system such as an OMS with strong IM capabilities. To fulfill your orders, you need accurate, real-time insights into your available inventory. In addition, your inventory levels are meaningless if you don’t have an understanding of the orders that depend on them for fulfillment. 

You can use an OMS to make sure your stock is automatically reserved or reduced as soon as a customer places an order as the OMS can send an automatic notification to the IMS to do so as soon as an order is placed. While an IMS will update your inventory levels across all sales channels as soon as new stock arrives. The IMS will automatically notify the OMS which will make sure customer-facing sales channels reflect the correct information about which products are available to buy. 

Boost sales

Many industries strive for a 99%-100% on-time delivery. But they can only achieve this if they know exactly what stock they have when customers want it. In addition, a recent study found that 40% of UK retailers fail to meet their promised delivery times. Unhappy customers are more likely to take their business elsewhere with 46% saying they won’t return to a store after a delivery delay. 

Integrated inventory and order management software significantly boosts sales by preventing overselling and ensuring product availability. With real-time inventory insights, you can make sure your inventory levels correlate with customer demand, ensuring products are available and orders get shipped out on time. This protects your customer satisfaction levels and helps ensure loyalty. 

Increase efficiency

Order and inventory management software can noticeably improve operational efficiency by automating numerous manual tasks, giving you real-time visibility into your inventory, and streamlining your operations. 

One of the biggest benefits of order and stock management software is its ability to automate essential tasks including inventory tracking, reordering, and updating your records; freeing up your employees to focus on other tasks. Employees can save an average of 3.6 hours every week, or 23 working days per year, with automation capabilities. 

Real-time data collection can give you insights into both your stock levels and how to improve and speed up order processing and fulfillment; helping you make smarter, more data-informed decisions and helping to ensure the fast and efficient running of your operations. 

Error reduction

Human error is one of the biggest issues with attempting to manage your inventory and orders manually. From miscounting your inventory to mistaking one item for another during order processing and fulfillment, it's easy to see how mistakes from manual data entry can quickly stack up and derail your inventory and order management. 

The latest research shows that automation can help reduce errors by up to 90%. With integrated software that can give you real-time insights into your inventory, orders, and sales channels, update your data to reflect any changes, and offer capabilities like barcode scanning for picking and packing and validation checks, you can help cut down drastically on the errors that come with manual data entry. 

Improve customer satisfaction

Late deliveries, mis-shipped items, and poor communication with a lack of updates can all dramatically affect customer satisfaction levels. 84% of consumers say they won’t return to a company after a poor delivery experience. 

This software can help you track your inventory levels more accurately as it collects real-time data on your stock; it can help you prevent overselling and letting customers down as your sales channels will have up-to-date stock levels, marking items out of stock, before an order is placed. It's also a great tool for helping to process and fulfill your orders faster and more efficiently, meaning customers get their orders on time. 

Scalability

The more orders and inventory you have, the harder it is to track and manage them using manual systems. Order and inventory management software is built to help you easily and effectively manage an increasingly large volume of orders, stock, and sales channels. It can help support your ramp up of operations while saving you time and minimising mistakes through automation.

The first step towards choosing the right inventory and order management software for your business is to draw up a list of your specific needs and targets. It’s important to assess tools based on your unique requirements, ideally from solution providers who specialise in your industry. 

It’s also essential to assess software based on how easy it is to use, features, cost, support opportunities, security features, and whether it can help support you as you scale. Always ask to run through a demo and come with a list of questions on how the tool can help address your unique needs and requirements.

Mintsoft is a brilliant tool for automating and optimising the speed and efficiency of your order management processes. From enhancing warehouse operations without the mistakes of manual approaches, to helping you easily manage all of your couriers for on-time delivery, Mintsoft was built to help 3PLs and ecommerce businesses manage their inventory levels and fulfill their orders in time and full, every time. Book your personalised demo with a product expert now.