In a rapidly evolving and highly competitive business environment retailers increasingly need to have a multi-dimensional information pool covering Inventory, Supply Chain and Revenue. Buying and selling is no more done in the old school ways. Retailers need to give more weight-age to customers’ expectations and preferences whilst remaining competitive at the same time. Moreover, to offer competitive pricing, the Inventory Management System needs to be revamped. Even the customer engagement requires some refining, like finding means to track the purchase history of the customers in real-time. The Retail Sector should therefore be focusing on automation systems that can integrate Stock Management and Accounting.
It is slightly erroneous on the part of some retailers who perceive a Point-of-Sale (POS) System accomplishing all this in isolation because a POS System essentially only manages the front-end of a Retail Store. Some retailers who understand this requirement but are apprehensive about adopting newer and better integrated systems still struggle across a number of manual processes to maintain their inventories & ledgers. They are unwilling to explore the idea of ERP-POS integration, an integration that is revolutionary in many ways.
Integrating POS with an ERP System will bring the pertinent information of Stocks, Sales and Revenue on the same platform and it will enable the retailer to establish a seamless correlation. Such a correlation will negate the possibility of a potential inventory mismanagement, thus augmenting the productivity of the business. Inventory Sales and Inventory Purchasing are two separate functions that are administered by the company’s POS and Financial System respectively. Integrating these two functions will lay the foundation of a highly proactive system that will trace the inventory level of a specific item and will trigger a purchase order automatically once the inventory level declines below a stipulated position.
An ERP with POS Integrated System will also enable capturing the crests and troughs of finances in real-time. For a refined analysis it is important to disintegrate a large chunk of information into nuggets like year-to-date sales, store location, or price of a particular commodity. The analytics on such nuggets will let retailers trace the seasonality trends of a commodity and monitor its price sensitivity. An integrated system will therefore give retailers the option to bring together different streams of data and analyzing the data depending on the nature of information they are looking for.
Setting a price for non-moving inventory can give a headache to retailers if they are unaware of the dynamic details pertaining to the inventory. To set the right price, it is important to have complete information about non-moving inventory that is simply consuming valuable floor space. Integrating ebizframe ERP, a flagship product of ESS, with a POS can help retailers to establish a correlation between the price offerings and the resulting sales. It can also aid them in tracking non-moving inventory and initiating steps for its quick liquidation.
Integration of ERP with POS is the way forward to eradicate the anomalies within the Supply and Demand construct, and there are no two ways about it. As a good sign for the future, many retailers have started believing in and implementing integrated ERP-POS Systems, a trend which will hopefully gather more steam sooner rather than later.
