Imagine walking into an independent grocery store at 7 a.m. Employees are stocking shelves, receiving deliveries, rotating produce, checking dates, and making final preparations for the morning’s customers. Doing all of this while juggling an early rush can make those morning hours a particularly hectic time for store operators.

Importance of Inventory Management

The average supermarket today carries over 33,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) of inventory, according to the Food Industry Association (FMI). These thousands of items can quickly become a business owner’s best friend or worst enemy. Manual tracking of this data using spreadsheet software can be quite challenging, especially with a large inventory.

A modern inventory management system provides a great deal of visibility to enable better product-buying decisions. Experienced grocery managers have traditionally made key inventory decisions based on experience. They knew which products sold well before football season, they knew when barbecue supplies would spike, and they remembered which holiday items needed larger orders.

Benefits of Modern Inventory Management

Good inventory data doesn’t just tell you what happened. It helps you understand why, and what to do next. Waste is perhaps the greatest challenge facing grocery retail today. Better inventory visibility means managers can recognize slow-moving items sooner and departments can adjust ordering quantities while stock that’s close to expiration can be used for promotions.

The goal isn’t simply to reduce waste, but to have the right products available for sale at the right time while minimizing losses of unsold products. That’s the difference between reactive and proactive inventory management.

Original reporting: El Paso News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.