Must-have Inventory Planning Solution For Furniture Businesses

Have your inventory ready when your customers are

The combination of unpredictable customer demand and volatile supply chains has left many retailers worried for their future, especially since previously successful leading brands like MADE.com went under after holding the wrong inventory at the wrong time.

But there is a solution: Inventory Planner.

It reliably predicts precise customer demand, telling you exactly what to buy and when to buy it, so you can rapidly adjust to market shifts before it’s too late.

Features for furniture retailers

Forecast accurately, buy confidently

Knowing exactly which products your customers are likely to buy (and in what quantities) gives you the power to stay ahead of the curve. Inventory Planner constantly analyzes your most recent customer demand and factors in critical indicators such as seasonality, YoY sales shifts, promotions and any unusual sales spike or drop to cleverly predict customer demand. Then it offers reliable buying recommendations (down to the last unit).

Add in flexibility to supply shifts

Inventory Planner helps you handle volatile supply chains proactively to avoid excess inventory that arrives at the wrong time and kills your cash flow. It lets you take rapid action when lead times change – at SKU, product category, brand, vendor and warehouse level. You can also reduce stockout risk on goods that experience supply shortages by adjusting your ideal stock cover days.

Liquidate slow-movers to release cash

The value of a furniture merchant’s inventory is often higher than most, which means you’re at higher risk of having cash tied up in inventory that doesn’t sell as quickly as you hoped. Inventory Planner highlights your overstocked items alongside the associated cost, so you can quickly identify your biggest cash-drainers and liquidate them to release cash.

Easily plan inventory for assemblies

Knowing how much and when to order each component of an assembly is challenging, especially when the supply chain causes issues. Inventory Planner offers inventory purchasing recommendations at component level based on reliable demand forecasts. It factors in each component’s stock level and supply time, so you always have everything you need available (and don’t risk messing up your cash flow).

Optimize your warehouse and shipping container space

When it comes to buying bulky inventory like furniture, space is an important consideration. Inventory Planner lets you factor in your shelf space capacity at every warehouse and scale your purchase orders to max out the space or weight available in containers, reducing the unit shipping cost of each item.

Cash-boosting metrics

Inventory Planner offers more than 200 meaningful metrics that enable decisions to keep your cash flow healthy, such as forecasted lost revenue/profit due to delayed replenishment, as well as metrics pulled from Google Analytics to further boost your revenue or profit. For instance, assess a product’s page views with its sales performance to understand if it should be merchandised differently on your webstore to drive more sales or profit.

Plan your purchasing budgets

If the value of your inventory is high, it’s essential to ensure you have enough budget for buying available. Inventory Planner’s Open-to-Buy (OTB) feature lets you plan your buying budgets by month or retail weeks to meet your goals, based on key metrics such as previous years’ revenue, expected margins and even the exact number of units you need to order based on retail price.

Easy multi-location inventory planning

Inventory Planner tells you exactly how much inventory is needed for each of your locations including your own warehouses, physical stores, Amazon FBA and 3PLs, based on accurate demand forecasting. Plus, it offers smart inventory transfer recommendations, allowing you to optimize your inventory levels across locations before ordering new stock.

Time-saving PO management

If you use lots of suppliers, including some overseas, to keep your costs low, placing POs can be time-consuming and prone to errors. With Inventory Planner, you can place purchase orders directly from your buying recommendations. Plus, pre-set all your supplier information such as currency, minimum order quantity and payment terms so they can be automatically applied to a new purchase order, saving you hours of valuable time.

"Inventory Planner analyzes your data and gives you sales forecasting and buying recommendations that you can actually trust. It’s incredible."

James Ewens, Head of E-Commerce at FurnitureBox

See exactly how much excess inventory you have

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Faq

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Who is Inventory Planner for?

Inventory Planner is the market-leading inventory planning software that is designed to help retailers, e-commerce brands, wholesalers and manufacturing merchants to make data-driven, profit-boosting inventory purchasing decisions based on reliable customer demand predictions, with different supply patterns factored in.

We support 2,600+ worldwide brands from startups to billion-dollar companies in every industry imaginable – from furniture and homeware to FMCG.

If your business holds inventory in your own warehouses, brick and mortar stores, or if you use Amazon FBA or 3PLs, and you want to reduce your excess inventory or safety stock ratio while keeping stockout risk low, Inventory Planner is for you.

2. Do I still need Inventory Planner if I already have an Inventory Management System (IMS)?

Short answer: yes! Longer answer: Inventory Management Systems are useful for tracking goods, but they don’t help you forecast demand and plan your inventory purchasing, especially when market trends are rapidly changing and consumer demand is unpredictable. Inventory Planner does.

In a nutshell, if you’re using an IMS, but still experiencing out of stock or excess stock issues, you should try Inventory Planner.

To learn more about the difference between an IMS and Inventory Planner, and pick the right system for your business, take a look at this guide.

3. Should I book a demo or start a 14-day free trial?

A virtual demo with one of our pros is the best and fastest way to see exactly how Inventory Planner will work specifically for your businesses, without needing to connect and configure your data yourself.

However, we understand you might prefer to dive straight in and explore for yourself (especially if you’re a demand forecasting or inventory planning specialist) so we also offer a 14-day free trial.

4. How is Inventory Planner different from other providers?

We’re proud to stand out from the crowd in a number of ways, including…

We’re true leaders in our field: Unlike generic inventory softwares, Inventory Planner is a market-leading specialized solution. We started back in 2012 (when inventory planning wasn’t even a ‘thing’!) and we’ve spent more than a decade fine-tuning our forecasting and inventory planning models so they get results, even in turbulent times.
Our forecasting is transparent and customizable: We believe you can only make informed decisions when you fully understand your data. With Inventory Planner, you’ll know exactly how your forecasting has been calculated (and you can tweak it to suit your needs), so you can take our forecasts and purchasing recommendations and use them to help you meet your goals.
We’re always evolving, just like the retail market: As part of Sage Group, we’re able to invest heavily and regularly in our innovation, so we’re always a step ahead of our competition when it comes to offering reliable forecasting and intelligent purchasing recommendations, even as markets shift.

5. Is it easy for me to implement and configure Inventory Planner on my own?

There are two options:

Implement and learn the system on your own
Inventory Planner is built to be intuitive, so you can self-implement the system and configure your forecasting strategies if you have experience with forecasting softwares and the bandwidth available.
Faster onboarding, led by us (RECOMMENDED)
If you’re looking for optimal time-to-value, we recommend our guided onboarding, led by us. This is the faster and hassle-free way to get set up for success. Our forecasting pros will get you and your team up and running on Inventory Planner quickly (on average within 30 days), including system integrations, data migration, bespoke forecasting strategy configurations, tests and intuitive training. It’s the best way to ensure you get the most from Inventory Planner.

6. What's the SKU limit with Inventory Planner?

Inventory Planner is a scalable solution built to work for businesses of any size, from startups to billion-dollar companies – so there is no SKU limit.

Plus, with our Data Warehouse Connectors, data from any source can be seamlessly synced with Inventory Planner (which means no siloed data or delayed syncs for businesses with large data sets across various platforms).

It starts with your data

Your inventory and sales data is the foundation on which our accurate forecasting and inventory planning is built on. That’s why we’ve made it easy to seamlessly and securely add it to Inventory Planner.

No matter where you store your data (whether it's your online stores, inventory and order management systems, warehouse management systems, or ERP, EDI, accounting tools and spreadsheets); we’ll get you connected so that you get forecasting and inventory buying recommendations that are accurate, reliable and always up-to-date.

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