We all know sales is the backbone of every business. Every function in a business enterprise is directly or indirectly dependent on sales, like manufacturing, marketing, accounts, and so on, as it drives the revenue in an organisation. An important function that is closely tied to sales is inventory. If the exact level of inventory/stock is not known, the sales team in a business may not be able to deliver the required quantity to its clients. As a result, they may under-commit or over-commit quantities to their clients, affecting the overall sales. Furthermore, the production team plans their production pipeline based on the current stock availability and sales forecasting provided by different teams. When you sell your products through channels like c&f, distributor and retail, where they use disparate systems and are Multi brand outlets, it becomes difficult to get a homogeneous sales data from their systems. This is where a Sales and Stock Visibility system steps in to ensure vertical and horizontal integration in the supply chain and accuracy in sales and stock visibility at these points on a real-time basis.
In this blog post, we’ve listed the 13 reasons why you should adopt sales and stock visibility solutions in your business.
Importance of sales and stock visibility solutions
Ensures departmental coordination
In any business, a lack of coordination between multiple business departments is a major challenge. For example, if your business departments like finance, manufacturing, and marketing are working without communicating information about sales and stock, it affects their performance and increases the chances of errors.
Unless business functions are in sync with each other, predicting sales and stock levels is a challenge.
You can ensure better demand projection and coordination amongst multiple business departments with sales and stock visibility solutions. For example, your sales team can ensure that enough stock is available to fulfil customer orders. Similarly, the production team will meet requirements according to the orders received by the sales team with stock visibility tools.
Helps attain organisational goals
Every investment you make in your business helps you come closer to achieving a specific organisational goal.
A sales and stock visibility system can help you attain organisational goals like reducing stock wastages or increasing business efficiency. Through a sales and stock visibility tool, the status of orders and the entire business supply chain can be seen in one single place.
Helps in better decision-making processes
Sales and stock visibility processes help accelerate the decision-making process in an organisation. For example, if sales orders are higher than expected during the festive season, managers and other decision-makers can plan procurement of more stock in advance or hire more workforce to meet this surge in demand.
Ensure Predictability And Trend Analysis
Stock and secondary sales solutions ensure predictability within an organization. For example, business owners, managers, and other decision-makers in the firm can view trends in sales over a period (week, month, quarter, year, etc.) and forecast sales in the future. Moreover, stock and sales solutions make it simple to view trends in sales over time. For example, one may observe that a specific product’s sales increase in the winter months.
Integration with other channels
The seamless integration of stock and secondary sales solutions with other applications helps in decision-making for other business channels. For example, the procurement team can plan their sourcing efficiently by viewing the stock level or the number of orders. An increase in orders from a specific location ensures better supply chain forecasting and management for that region by replenishing stock on time. It can also help in integration with other fields like marketing spends, advertising, sales team recruitment, and planning based on projections.
Better Resource Utilisation
Stock and secondary sales solutions ensure the best possible utilisation of resources. Firms can use the raw material within the organisation and transform them into finished goods, enabling goods to be transformed in the best possible way without any overproduction or underproduction of stock. Furthermore, better resource utilisation prevents any costs of holding up stock in the form of capital.
Timely product launches
Secondary sales and stock visibility solutions ensure timely product launches in the market, as per the capacity of the production team to produce sufficient quantities. For example, the production team may need to fulfil existing product demand before focusing on increasing the quantity produced for any new product.
Enabling Better Team Performance
Your team is dependent on information to make critical business decisions. Your team’s performance may decline without this information as few tasks may need to be paused or stopped altogether.
With Nandini Infosys, your team can quickly work according to the data presented by a sales and stock visibility system. No longer will delayed information prevent them from performing tasks efficiently.
Prevent threats coming your way
Inventory mismanagement, damage, and theft are alarming situations for your business.
Having a 360-degree view of your sales and inventory will help you view information about business partners like creditors, ensure inventory management, and track and monitor data. In addition, supply chain systems prevent any threats like fraud from leading to losses for your company.
Eliminate Human Errors
Human errors may happen once in a while-after all, only stock tools can afford to be accurate at all times.
Counting the wrong inventory levels or amount spent in production processes are examples of human errors that can impact business efficiency. You’ll leave zero scope for any human error that may creep into your business processes with sales and stock visibility solutions.
No Reliance on Paper-Based Planning
Paper-based planning is time-consuming and requires extreme care concerning handling multiple papers at specific locations to avoid any loss of data or information written on them. In addition, planning on paper can be a barrier if more time is spent looking for information rather than decision-making.
With secondary sales and stock visibility solutions, you’ll be able to stop relying on paper-based planning to make decisions. This will help boost your overall performance.
Help simplify returns management processes
A stock management system helps track which customer has requested a return for which order purchased by a customer and the location where the initial delivery of the product was made. This simplifies the return management process and ensures clarity concerning the returns made by the customers.
Improved Profit Margins
With sales and stock visibility solutions, stock wastage is eliminated as stock is optimised. This helps improve profit margins for your business.
Conclusion
Sales and stock visibility solutions help in better planning and supply chain analysis, which make supply chains more agile. They help businesses improve their profitability by reducing stock wastages, ensuring demand projection and better inventory management. This helps not just the manufacturing sector but also helps distributors and retailers to have a better transparent supply-demand analysis.
If you’re looking for one single sales and stock visibility system that can help your business grow and meet demand cycles in your firm, consider Nandini Infosys for such a solution. We use business process management as middleware and our software works between primary systems and data flows as per the stock movement. Click here to know more about the supply chain forecasting and management services we offer.
