Running a business means keeping a lot of plates spinning, but few tasks are as crucial—or as challenging—as managing your inventory. Whether you’re a small e-commerce seller or a mid-sized distributor, ineffective inventory management can sink your company by creating shortages, damaging customer service levels, and eating into your bottom line.
The good news? NetSuite offers a robust set of inventory management tools that can help you track items down to the serial number, forecast demand, automate replenishment, and more. As a NetSuite solution provider, we’ve helped dozens of companies get accurate, real-time visibility into their inventory to help items flow efficiently through their business.
In this article, we’ll walk through key inventory management challenges, how NetSuite can solve them, and why SuiteDynamics is the right partner to ensure you get the most value from the platform.
What Inventory Management Issues Keep You Up at Night?
Before we dive into the NetSuite solution, let’s look at some of the common inventory headaches businesses face:
- Inaccurate counts: It’s impossible to manage what you can’t measure. Without real-time visibility into item counts, you risk shortages, stockouts, and even writing off inventory that’s stuck somewhere in your warehouses.
- Inefficient replenishment: Leaving inventory replenishment processes manual and reactive causes all sorts of issues down the line from increased carrying costs to production delays and more.
- Lack of traceability: Whether due to regulatory requirements or customer expectations, more businesses need item-level traceability to track the full journey of their products after they leave the warehouse.
- Forecasting misses: Even slight forecast inaccuracies can leave you with too much or too little inventory. Without looking at historical trends and predictive data, forecasts turn into guesswork.
- Poor visibility across channels: For brands selling through retail stores, e-commerce, and more, managing omnichannel inventory availability is hugely challenging without a centralized solution.
These kinds of struggles end up draining cash flow, profits, and customer goodwill when items end up stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. So what’s the antidote? Let’s look at how NetSuite can alleviate inventory headaches.
How NetSuite’s Inventory Management Capabilities Bring Simplicity and Accuracy?
NetSuite is a cloud-based ERP platform aimed at helping mid-sized to large businesses manage everything from financials and inventory to omnichannel sales and manufacturing. Product companies, distributors, retailers and wholesalers make up a large share of NetSuite customers, making inventory management capabilities crucial.
Here are some of the key ways NetSuite approaches inventory:
Granular tracking and costing
NetSuite offers lot and serial/bin tracking capabilities to give item-level inventory visibility that meets strict traceability needs. Whether you need to track items back to suppliers for quality assurance or provide customers transparent data on sourcing, NetSuite has you covered. Real-time inventory counts ensure high accuracy (rather than quarterly cycle counts), while landed cost functionality improves costing accuracy.
Automated replenishment
Min–max, auto-reorder point, and dynamic reorder point logic combine with NetSuite’s inventory snapshot to take the guesswork out of replenishment. Instead of reacting to stockouts, you can automate the reorder process based on usage. You can also build automated workflows for drop shipping or stock transfers between locations.
Demand planning and visibility
Understand where demand is headed using historical sales data, trends, seasonality analysis, predictions, KPIs and more. Optimize stock levels, queue production schedules, and staff warehouses appropriately for what’s around the bend instead of flying by gut feel.
Omnichannel distribution
For wholesalers and distributors selling through different channels, NetSuite makes inventory visible and optimized across channels. Allocate stock against orders, seamlessly integrate new sales channels, and enable buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS) or ship from store capabilities.
As you can see, NetSuite transforms inventory management from a constant source of anxiety to an area of operational strength. Next, let’s look at how SuiteDynamics helps you get maximum value from the platform.
Why Choose SuiteDynamics as Your NetSuite Partner?
With years of experience as a 5-star rated NetSuite partner, SuiteDynamics intimately understands the platform’s capabilities and how to tailor it to each customer’s needs. Here’s what sets us apart when it comes to NetSuite inventory deployments:
- Domain expertise. From medical devices to food and beverage, our consultants bring deep familiarity with the nuances of different verticals so we can configure NetSuite’s inventory tools accordingly. We understand your business first, technology second.
- Proven methodology. Our 8-step NetSuite implementation process ensures no steps are missed and no decisions are made unilaterally by software vendors. We shepherd you from planning to go-live seamlessly.
- Ongoing optimization. We’re with you for the long-haul with post go-live enhancement services. As your business needs evolve, we help you continuously improve and unlock more value from NetSuite.
- Strategic guidance. Beyond just software implementation, we offer advisory services to help align systems strategy with business goals. This ensures you squeeze maximum ROI from your tech investments.
The bottom line? NetSuite provides invaluable inventory visibility, control and efficiencies, while SuiteDynamics delivers confidence that it will work for your organization. Contact us today to learn more or request a demo. We’re ready to tame your inventory beast.
