An accurate inventory forecast should not be taken lightly and can help your business avoid some huge supply chain headaches. Inventory forecasting uses past data, trends, upcoming factors, and customer behavior to predict needed inventory levels at a future time. Inventory forecasting helps you best prepare for unforeseen circumstances, and sudden demand and supply issues.
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Your customers expect you to always have a certain amount of stock available and planning ahead will ensure that they get the best experience possible with your brand. Imagine having a popular t-shirt that your customers love, but it’s hardly available? They may lose trust in your brand and go shop somewhere else.
Here are some factors that play a key role in accurate inventory forecasting:
As you can see, a lot goes into inventory forecasting and many different departments are important to make sure proper numbers are reported. It may be a lot of work, but overall, can save you a lot of stress later down the road.
This next section will dive into the different types of inventory forecasting and how each one could be used for your business.
Trend forecasting: Trend forecasting is the process of researching and formulating predictions on consumers' future buying habits. By identifying the source, tracing the evolution, and recognizing patterns of trends, forecasters are able to provide designers and brands with a ‘vision’ of the future.
Graphical forecasting: This type of inventory forecast uses past data and plots it in graphs. This can include line graphs, pie charts, and any other graph forms. Graphs are a great way to visually analyze data and compare variables. Suppose your brand recently increased product prices and you wanted to see how this has affected customer demand. By putting these two variables in a line graph, you can easily see how one variable is affecting the other. This allows your brand to better understand moving forward the impact certain decisions have on your bottom line and how you can maximize profits.
Qualitative forecasting: Qualitative forecasting is an estimation methodology that uses expert judgement, rather than numerical analysis. This type of forecasting relies upon the knowledge of highly experienced employees and consultants to provide insights into future outcomes. This type of forecasting can be useful when predicting future results that are expected to deviate from previous results.
Quantitative Forecasting: Quantitative forecasting is a data-based process. This process uses historical data to make more precise decisions based on mathematics. For example, this process can use historical sales numbers that have been recorded to model future sales figures.
Now we’ll go over the benefits of inventory forecasting
It’s as simple as this: Inventory forecasting gets your business more organized and as a result, your operations become more efficient. Having products go in and out of your warehouse as quickly as possible means less money is wasted by products taking up space.
You always want to ensure that there is stock for your customers. You want to keep them as happy as possible and increase the chances that they’ll return to your brand as a repeat customer. Additionally, planning ahead will let you avoid late orders from suppliers and ensure you have a smooth process in place with them.
As a business owner, you’re always planning ahead for your brand and there are a lot of goals you will need to hit along the way. This takes a lot of preparation, budgeting, and coordination with your team. For example, you might have a new product launching in the future to compete with a competitor of yours. It’s important that you have enough stock at all times and a proper system in place to replenish the stock.
Blastramp is an easy-to-use cloud-based order and inventory management software designed to support B2B and B2C Brands manage their inventory and sales orders. We specialize in integrating multiple client systems and seamlessly synchronizing with third party applications. And, our comprehensive platform was designed and developed based on direct feedback from the markets we service and experts in the supply chain industry.
Unlike most order and inventory management software companies that follow the traditional one-size-fits-all approach, Blastramp has been designed to support businesses of all sizes in their growth cycle.
As a growing business, we understand that more of your time and money should go into the actual work of serving your customers instead of worrying about buying an expensive order and inventory management software subscription.
We take great pride in offering customizable plans and solutions for the brands that use our order and inventory management software.
The cost structure for our order and inventory management software is straightforward based on a pay-as-you-go model. Our essential plan starts at $295/month*, providing you with tools to take your order management to the next level.
* Excludes one-time set up fee of $495
Now we’ll explore the features that are included in our plan and the boosters you can add based on your specific business needs.
What's in your plan?
Orders
Inventory
Customers
Integrations
The features listed above make our essential plan a great option to start off with as your business continues to grow. With all of our customers, we begin by learning about your business; your products and your primary focus, the platforms and channels you use, and how you communicate internally within your organization and externally with vendors and suppliers. Once this assessment has been completed, we can then create a roadmap with your team to discuss other features you might need a couple months down the road, or perhaps a few years later. Regardless of which stage your business is in the grow cycle, Blastramp’s order and inventory management software can easily adapt and adjust to your brand’s needs.
If you’re interested in learning more about our cloud-based ERP software, you can take advantage of our Blast Academy, a set of training modules and step-by-step tutorials that guide you to get the most out of our cloud-based ERP software. Whether you’re looking for an answer to a specific question or want to build your Blastramp skills, our Blast Academy is the perfect one-stop-shop for your training needs. With Blast Academy by your side, you’ll be an expert in no time!
If you have any other questions that need to be answered, feel free to email us at info@blastramp.com.
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