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Real-time inventory visibility

Stock management made simple

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Why is inventory visibility important?

The ability to track inventory in real time helps provide up-to-date information on a business's inventory status and critical insights into business operations. Accurate inventory visibility allows you to see your sellable stock, no matter where it is. This can allow you to make smarter decisions about stock replenishment, avoid costly stockouts, and enable seamless shopping experiences for customers online, in-store, and across channels.

What is real-time inventory visibility?

Real-time inventory visibility goes beyond just knowing what you have in stock. It involves integrating accurate data from warehouses, stores, and fulfillment centers into a unified view that updates dynamically. Through utilizing this real-time inventory data, you can view a business's available inventory, excess inventory, stockouts, and more inventory availability insights.

This visibility empowers retailers to:

Meet customer demands seamlessly across channels.
Reduce the risk of overstocking or understocking.
Streamline operations and improve decision-making.

In other words, real-time inventory visibility is the ability to see, manage, and optimize inventory levels in real time across all locations and sales channels.

Key benefits of real-time inventory visibility

Reduce Stockouts and Increase Sales

Real-time visibility allows businesses to ensure product availability by dynamically tracking stock levels across locations and channels. This improves inventory accuracy to reduce stockouts, capture more sales opportunities, and ensure customers always find the products they want, whether shopping online or in-store.

Enable Accurate Inventory Promising

With real-time inventory visibility, you can confidently promise products to customers, even against inbound inventory. This allows you to maximize sales while reducing excess stock and keeping fulfillment efficient.

Make Smarter Replenishment Decisions

By analyzing real-time sales data and inventory trends, you can optimize replenishment cycles through an inventory management software. This reduces overstocking, lowers carrying costs, and improves profitability through smarter, data-driven decisions on when and how much to reorder.

Common challenges include:

Fragmented Systems: Without centralized inventory data, retailers often struggle to maintain accurate stock levels across locations.

Delayed Updates: Slow or manual inventory updates can lead to costly errors.

Limited Forecasting: A lack of real-time insights makes it difficult to anticipate trends and adjust stock levels proactively.

The challenges of inventory management solutions

Managing inventory effectively is no small feat, especially for businesses with multiple sales channels and fulfillment locations.

Deck Commerce addresses challenges with its industry-leading OMS, which consolidates inventory data into a single source of truth, updates information in real time, and provides actionable insights for smarter decision-making.

34%

of businesses have shipped an order late because they inadvertently sold a product that was not in stock.

10%

of inventory costs can be saved by fixing understocking and overstocking issues.

Here's how it works:

Data Aggregation: Inventory data from all sources is consolidated into a unified view, providing real-time insights into stock levels.

Automated Updates: As inventory tracking software changes, the system updates across all channels automatically, ensuring accuracy at every touchpoint.

Smart Allocations: Deck Commerce leverages sales patterns, demand forecasts, and supply chain insights to allocate inventory intelligently.

Advanced Analytics: Actionable insights enable better decisions, from replenishment planning to stock allocation.

How real-time inventory visibility works

Deck Commerce’s OMS integrates inventory data from all your locations, including warehouses, retail stores, fulfillment centers, and more, into a single, intuitive platform offering an accurate inventory count.

By leveraging automation and data analytics, businesses can ensure that inventory information is accurate and always up to date, creating a seamless shopping experience for top customer satisfaction and increasing overall operational efficiency.

FAQs

Inventory manager scanning warehouse stock

The five stages of the inventory management process are demand forecasting, replenishment, order processing, storage and organization, and reporting and analysis. Each of these steps affect inventory visibility and the overall functionality of your business, so paying attention to all of these processes is essential to achieve maximum efficiency.

Near real-time produces quick data updates but with a slight delay. Real-time processing is instantaneous and has minimal or no delay between the output and input of data.

While they are often used interchangeably, stock refers to finished products available for immediate sale to customers, and inventory refers to all goods and materials used by a business, including raw materials and in-progress items.