Did you know your business could be more efficient and grow faster? Of course it could!

There’s always room for improvement, especially if you’re not using real-time data to track your supply chain or handle your inventory management. Data can help you tighten up any aspect of your company, from order management to reverse logistics, if you implement it correctly.

Efficient Retailers are Successful, Thriving Retailers

Today’s retailers and eCommerce companies have access to an unprecedented amount of information on their day-to-day operations, as well as those of their supply chain.

Instead of simply guessing at what’s happening to their delayed shipments, they can plug in directly to the shipper and get a real time update or reroute those deliveries to other warehouses in the hopes of speeding up the ship-to-customer process. This is just one of many examples of how real-time information can help a business like yours not only succeed, but really grow in this eCommerce-centric economy.

Here are some other areas where you can use real-time data to improve processes, reduce costs or improve the customer experience:

  • Optimizing your inventory. Keeping items in inventory too long can become a costly game, but not having enough product on hand to fill orders in a timely fashion will seriously impact the customer experience. What’s a retailer to do?Real-time data can help you learn how to accurately predict demand and forecast what types of products are likely to be hot, or not. This way, you can get rid of items that are simply dead weight and fill your inventory with just the right number of high margin winners.
  • Reducing materials expense. Real-time data also allows you to see real-time material costs, and compare those costs as your manufacturing processes progress. So, you may end up working with multiple suppliers in order to get the best deals on your products, but it’s just a matter of clicking a few buttons to select the best price that week.Real-time reporting and visibility also can help push those materials cost down industry-wide, since your suppliers know you’re constantly shopping their competition.
  • Improving returns management. Returns management has long been a challenge for retailers, especially operations that handle many different kinds of inventory. That’s where real-time data products like the smart label come into play.These things make handling reverse logistics a piece of cake. The instant that a return with a smart label is scanned by a shipper, you’ll get a notification and your reverse logistics team can start tracking the package and prepare for it to arrive. The day it comes, they already know what should be inside and how the customer wants to receive their credit. As long as everything checks out, that product can quickly re-enter your inventory and be resold with as much value intact as possible.

Real-time information has revolutionized the supply chain and the way that both retailers and eCommerce businesses operate. With so much data so easy to access, you can really increase your efficiency and make your business grow like you’ve never dreamed was possible.