5 Reasons Why Small Business Needs Automated Operations

Everyone who owns a small business wants to invest less in inventory, improve their order fulfillment efficiency rate, earn more, grow exponentially, and outshine their competitors. Even you might have gone continuously around and searched for ways to minimize investments in stocking the warehouse without sacrificing on quality, sales, and brand value. However, while it is a worthy goal to keep your eyes on, you need to understand that to achieve this goal, you need to innovate the way you manage your inventory.

For example, let’s take a hypothetical scenario; you happen to increase your sales this year by 200% in this festive season and even beat your competitors or are neck to neck with them.

However, your contemporaries end up making more profit as compared to you, and you suffer a loss because there is still a lot of inventory left to sell, but the sale is over, so the investment that you made was more.

Also, to hold that excess inventory, there will be an extra cost that you have to pay. This way, although you beat your competitors by the number of sales, you won’t be able to beat them as far as earning profits is concerned.

What exactly went wrong in the above-given example? Lack of planning?

Yes, but to be precise, let’s say inventory planning.
But there is one more significant flaw than inventory planning – what is it?

It’s the absence of willingness to change with time, i.e., innovating with time. Your competitors might have started innovating and using exclusive automated inventory management software for small business, but you stuck to old excel technique, and that’s where it all went wrong.

It’s the age of Automated software, and you can see automation everywhere right from a small google search to a colossal car manufacturing workshop or rocket launching pieces of machinery.

One good example of a company that has benefited hugely from an Automated Inventory, order, and shipping management software, i.e., operations management software, is Robemart. It offers a wide range of high-quality Turkish bathrobes.

Automating the inventory helped Robemart to have instantaneous knowledge of inventory levels with the help of which they could forecast sales and efficiently plan for the future orders.

The automated inventory management feature of the operations software also helped them to calculate the value of inventory and segregate the stock based on profitability.

This gave them a clear idea of whether they were in profit or not or in which section of inventory they were in profit and in which part they were lagging. To know the success story of Robemart on how they are overcoming their barriers in managing their inventory, click here.

You might think,” but the Automated inventory, order, and shipping management systems for small businesses tend to be costly, and do I need it? I am okay with excel or free inventory management softwares, and I don’t need it right now.”

Well, even after reading the above-given example, if you think that,” do I need to automate my operations with these types of softwares for small business?” Then read below to know – 5 Reasons Why You Need Automated Inventory, Order and Shipping Management Software for Small Business?

As an owner of a small online retail business, you wake up every day and realize that there is a list of mundane tasks you ought to do. Of course, you would like to see the number of orders that came in, but then you have to feed them into your excel, which is time taking and sometimes annoying.

Moreover, creating a picklist, finding the SKU location of each product, and arranging them. If there are bundled product orders from combo offers, then making sure that the combos are shipped correctly by generating shipping labels, manifests, and coordinating with 3PLs to keep track of the products you ship through them. Managing all of these tasks is in itself a hell of a job to accomplish.

And, on top of all these efforts, you have to regularly update excel to keep track of your inventory both inwards and outwards because excel is not a pro-active software.

Now, if I tell you that all of the above tasks apart from picking the product and keeping it in front of your shipping partner can be automated, how would you feel?

That’s great. Isn’t it?

Right from the day, you receive your products, in fact, even before that from the day you order them from your supplier.

You can keep track of your inventory –

• Monitor each product’s life cycle
• Create pick lists (the software, shows you the location of the SKU where the ordered product is kept, you don’t have to search for the location of the SKU or product, go and pick it up)
• Create product variants and bundles
• Managing product catalog
• Accepting bulk inwards
• Documenting inventory outwards
• Automatically making changes in the software
• Invoicing categorizing products and tagging them

It can be arguably said that almost everything can be automated as far as inventory management and order fulfillment is concerned.

To get the gist of the software, please watch the short video given below.

To get the complete experience of an automated inventory, order and shipping management software, sign up for a 15-days free trial asap.

You can wake up with a smile on your face and less stress in your head to see that everything is done on its own, and you have to pick the products and ship them.

By now, you might have understood that since everything is automated, you save a considerable amount of time. As soon as the order is placed to the time the order gets delivered or returned and comes to you, you can perform most of the tasks with the help of automation in operations management software for small business.

Automatically confirming paid orders > creating pick list >assigning shipping carrier>creating the shipping label and manifest> tracking shipment.

“As per the research conducted by Get Data Research, 55% of small business owners confirmed that they save more than 4-5 hours a week and 16% of the surveyed small business owners say that they save more than a day/ week after using inventory management software.”

Dropshippers always face a lot of problems when it comes to coordinating with their suppliers or managing backorders.

Since the automated inventory, order, and shipping management software for small business can be integrated with Amazon FBAs or your suppliers. You can have real-time inventory visibility that can enable you to manage backorders, automatically raise POs along with being able to create and change your marketing and sales strategy accordingly.

Avoiding unnecessary spendings is the most crucial aspect for small businesses, and here is where automated inventory management features of operations management software for small business chips in to protect you from investing more, stocking excessively, forecasting demand inaccurately.

The Automated operations management software for small business saves you from overstocking and saves on inventory carrying cost by helping you forecast demand accurately, stocking inventory correctly, and managing perishable inventory smartly.

The cost involved in managing and storing the unsold inventory is called inventory carrying cost, which, according to Investopedia, is 20% -30% of the total inventory cost.

Therefore, with the help of an inventory management system for small business, you save a considerable amount of money by effectively managing inventory while fashion trends change.

For instance, for the winter collection, you ordered 100 leather jackets of a specific pattern. However, halfway through, the fashion trends changed, and suddenly you have to order in trend jackets.

So, even though by the end of the season you have made more sales, you still have those 50 or 60 or 70 or whatever leftover jackets from the prior batch of 100 jackets that went out of fashion.

Those jackets would account for unwanted inventory with extra investment. The storage of which will increase your inventory carrying cost. There are chances that the manufacturer or supplier might take it back, but the money and time that is wasted to hold that inventory might initially look small. Still, in a period of 2-3 years, it can be considered a considerable amount.

Thus, efficient inventory management software for small business can help you manage your inventory according to changing trends with the help of its automatically generated reports and analytics like –

•  Low stock reports
•  Inventory onhand report
• Backordered inventory report
• Out of stock report
• Inventory valuation report by last purchase price
• Inventory by Location report

And many more useful reports that you won’t find in excel or a free outdated inventory management software.

Furthermore, better inventory planning can save you from out-of-stock scenarios.

The automated order fulfillment process enables you to increase the perfect order percentage and deliver products much quicker. You can promise same-day shipping to your customers, which in return will have a positive impact on your sales, thus allowing you to earn more.

Tinuiti.com stated in their research that an automated inventory management software for small business would reduce forecasting errors upto 50% and inventory upto 20%-50%.

Also, the essential thing that inventory management features in operations software for small business offers is real-time inventory visibility. Knowing what is the status of inventory instantaneously is a boon in itself because you can understand what a better alternative of a product that your customer is looking for, which is out-of-stock is. So, you can try and upsell the alternative product.

The picture now becomes very much evident as far as maximizing profit is considered because, as stated above, the inventory management software for small business decreases unnecessary investments and helps in growing sales, thus increasing profit for your small business.

By now, you might have understood that investing in an ecommerce operations management software for small business is a good thing for the growth of your business, and you should buy one as soon as possible.

However, you might think that the automated inventory, order, and shipping management software might cost a lot, but here’s the good news that these automated softwares like Orderhive start with costs as cheap as $44.99/month, i.e., $540 for a year.

By investing this small amount of money for a year, you can save yourself from the mind-numbing stress, huge unknown losses through increased inventory carrying cost, manual errors, and delays.

I hope by now, you might have a small idea of why you need to move on from the obsolete inventory, order, and shipping management methods and embrace the automated techniques. The automated Operations(inventory, order, and shipping) management software for small business not only makes life easy for you but also upgrades your entire way of doing eCommerce. Moreover, customer satisfaction is the most crucial thing which you only focus on when you get out of your inventory.

A soul of a small business owner feeds on motivation that you provide it but now since the times are changing, you need to step up and hence, don’t just motivate instead –

MOTIVATE, INNOVATE & AUTOMATE.