By Tina Royall at Futura Retail Solutions
“For fashion brands, store design and product quality is driving competition. However, selecting the right technology is equally important if you want to limit how much capital is tied up in stock and ensure your customers aren’t disappointed when items aren’t available. The ability to plan inventory, maximise sell-through and minimise losses from mark-downs and stock-outs is crucial. It’s all about merchandising and inventory control. With modern real-time EPoS solutions, automated processes and system intelligence are improving performance and increasing accuracy to make the merchandiser’s life easier. Features like Recommended Reordering to replace manual Purchase Orders are especially useful and will reduce your workload. Automated stock replenishment, plus the ability to dynamically set minimum and maximum stock levels, will add further time saving and accuracy helping to reduce over-ordering on unpopular items and fringe sizes. System generated inter-branch transfers between stores and online is another real benefit. Here system intelligence will spot opportunities so that you can follow trends and optimise sales before you need to reorder. Merchandising needs accurate forecasting with sound analysis so strong reporting should come as standard with the best EPoS systems. Look for automated stock and sales reports with at-a-glance performance information covering branch, department and category data, with comparative information for previous periods, to drive improved decision making.” Tel: 01189 841 925 Futura4retail.co.uk