How to Increase Gun Store Cash Flow with Inventory Replenishment Automation
As the shooting sports retail market becomes ever more competitive, finding the means to be cash flow positive while decreasing retail gun store expenses becomes imperative. For example, supply chain processes such as sourcing and purchasing are high priority areas that benefit from the use of technology and should be at forefront of consideration. Collectively, these two areas drive the replenishment of inventories, the execution of which has far reaching affects within a firearms retail business, particularly to profitability and growth.
Expensive Gun Store Inventory Practices
Many analyses of inventory procurement processes show that the amount of effort put into the monitoring and sourcing of shooting sports products can be staggering and very expensive. For operations that employ inefficient manual – or semi-manual – inventory ordering processes, the amount of time allocated to identifying shortages and needs can reach upwards of 2-3 hours a day, not to mention the additional hours required to create and place orders.
Combing over reports of historic transactional information or – worse yet – painstakingly ‘walking the floor’ with a clipboard in search of empty pegs, as strategies to determine inventory needs, can prove to be very time consuming and may have additional unintended ramifications. Simply using gun store POS sales history as means of identifying needed inventory ignores the often-overlooked problems of overstocks and stock aging. Relying on historical retail sales numbers for ordering makes assumptions that current on hand product quantities are low (which may or may not be true) and never allows the shooting sports inventory to sell through or ‘turn over’ properly. Conversely, the tactic of using empty pegs to indicate needed stock proves to perpetuate a consequence of poor retail inventory management; lost gun store sales opportunities. By allowing items that are selling to be become completely depleted and unavailable to customers seeking to purchase them, creates a loss of potential revenue that greatly compounds the negative impact these methods have on the bottom line.
Modern Retail Firearm POS Technology: Transforming Waste into Profit
The good news is that many of these inventory management short falls can be solved by optimizing the gun store replenishment process through automation. Robust retail management software, such as Orchid POS, offers firearms retailers the tools to automatically replenish inventory through system generated processes. By removing the laborious elements of manual ordering techniques and replacing them with technology assisted automation, a firearms retailer is able to employ much more sophisticated ‘just-in-time’ inventory practices.
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