The Go-to Inventory Planning Solution for Retail, DTC, E-Commerce and Wholesale Businesses

Effectively plan your purchasing, in unpredictable times

In the current marketplace, rapidly-shifting customer demand and ongoing supply chain challenges can put your cash flow at risk and make it harder than ever to get the right inventory in stock at the right time. Enter Inventory Planner.

It’s the top-rated inventory planning solution that offers always up-to-date demand forecasting and future-proofed purchasing recommendations.

It’s the tried-and-tested tool that enables merchants, from startups to billion-dollar brands, to stop overstocks and out-of-stocks for good and always have the perfect inventory to meet demand.

Buy what your customers want – and always get it on time

Forecast accurately, buy confidently

Inventory Planner offers high-accuracy demand forecasting by constantly analyzing various fluctuations such as seasonality, new sales patterns, promotions, unusual spikes or drops. It then translates it into reliable buying recommendations for all your products including seasonal, non-seasonal, retail and wholesale products.

Shorter purchasing cycle, healthier cash flow

Planning your purchasing months or even years ahead might reduce stockout risk, but it adds a burden to your cash flow, which can ultimately put your business in danger. With Inventory Planner, you can shorten your purchasing cycle while still keeping stockout risk low (and releasing much-needed cash). How? Adjust ideal ‘stock cover days’ at any level (such as SKU or supplier) to match your purchasing frequency with each item’s supply patterns.

Act quickly on your cash-drainers

Thanks to shifting customer demand, you have to know the precise moment when you should release cash from slow-moving products and reinvest it in trending items. Inventory Planner highlights your overstocked items alongside key info including the cost of each overstocked item, so you can quickly see which items to liquidate first to release cash.

Easy bundle and assembly forecasting

It’s vital to choose an inventory planning software that automates bundle and assembly inventory planning to save time to avoid overbuying certain components and underbuying others. Inventory Planner accurately forecasts demand by bundle or assembly and breaks it down to how much inventory of each component is needed and when it needs to be ordered.

Actionable inventory insights

Master your inventory performance with over 200 meaningful metrics such as forecasted revenue, forecasted profit, retail value, overstocked units and more. Plus, Inventory Planner integrates with Google Analytics to take your reporting to the next level. Easily 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.

Buy new styles with confidence

Does investing in new products feel like a gamble? Inventory Planner eliminates the guesswork by allowing you to ‘borrow’ sales data from similar products as a reference to predict future demand for new products. You’ll get buying recommendations for every variant (including size, color, material), so you can invest with confidence.

Optimize your buying budgets

If the value of your inventory value is high, or if you stock lots of seasonal items, it’s essential to ensure you get your budgets spot on. 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 your key metrics like previous years’ revenue, expected margins and even the exact number of units you need to order based on retail price.

Forecast for multiple warehouses

Multiple sales channels plus multiple warehouses can equal multiple headaches. Not with Inventory Planner. Inventory Planner cleverly forecasts demand for all of your locations including your own warehouses, Amazon FBA, and 3PLs, and tells you what to buy and when to order for each location accordingly. It even tells you if a warehouse transfer can balance your inventory across locations, without 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.

"It’s an incredibly robust tool. We’ve seen lead times go from 45 days to 120 days just like that – so the challenge for us now is using Inventory Planner data to stay on top of things as they quickly change."

John Ibbetson, VP Sales and Business Development at trueCABLE

"We wanted a tool that would stop us getting into trouble with a lack of stock – but that could also help us proactively avoid overstock. It was clear from the reviews and research that Inventory Planner was that tool."

Dylan Vasquez, Operations Manager at Atomic Defense

Get your customer demand forecasts and inventory buying recommendations

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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 apparel and fashion 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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