If you’re a small, inventory-based business operating in today’s digital landscape, then you know that automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are here and that they’re here to stay. Automation is simply using technology to perform human tasks, and AI is (not so) simply computer systems designed to perform tasks previously only performed by humans, such as learning from data and making decisions, but arguably, doing it faster and better.
The benefits of utilizing automation and AI—especially when they work symbiotically—are manifold, from saving your business time and money to boosting your productivity levels through the roof. In fact, businesses around the world are already happily taking advantage, with the global industrial automation market on track to reach approximately 265 billion U.S. dollars.
Essentially, your competitors are banking on automation to take their business to the next level, which means you should be too. But where do you start?
With Cin7.
Cin7 is cloud-based inventory management software (IMS) that delivers exceptional features crafted specifically with your product business in mind. Here’s a look at some of the many automation capabilities you can expect to enjoy as a valued Cin7 customer.
The days of dreaming about being able to email a sales report to your CEO without logging into your inventory management system, receive notifications of abandoned carts, and automatically send or receive emails that inform you that a product is low or your sales rep that a customer hasn’t ordered in X number of days are over. With Cin7’s powerful Automation module, your dreams have become reality.
You can set up events and actions that will trigger automatically once certain actions are achieved in the product life cycle. You can also set up tasks, which are linked with notifications, to create workflows related to Purchases, Sales, Suppliers, Customers, Credit Notes, and Assembly/Disassembly.
Say good-bye to manual instructions and hello to automating actions that improve your efficiency, reduce errors, and help you identify ways you can improve your workflows.
Notifications within Cin7 contain information about orders, sales, inventory, customers, suppliers, and more from the Automation module (available as an add-on to your Cin7 Core subscription).
Whether delivered as alerts from your dashboard or as emails for single or multiple recipients, notifications keep both internal and external parties updated on vital Cin7 updates. Automatic notifications also extend to reminders to let your team members know what’s on their oh-so-important to-do list.
Reporting is one of the most important and most challenging aspects of inventory management.
Cin7 provides more than 70 customizable reports that supply auto-generated insights into your sales, purchases, inventory, production, and financial data. You’ll be able to share reports easily to inform marketing and sales activities, make data-driven decisions around KPIs and OKRs, simplify day-to-day prioritization of business activities, and source your reports and dashboards with valuable forecasting-based data.
Most of these reports can be automatically generated (are you sensing a theme here?) and sent to authorized users via a Report Scheduling feature. You can customize, apply filters, search, export, and publish these reports easily as well as schedule them to be run daily, weekly, or monthly.
This August, we were thrilled to launch ForesightAI, our AI-powered Advanced Inventory Forecasting feature.
“Cin7 is at a major inflection point with AI,” said Cin7 CEO Ajoy Krishnamoorthy in our press release. “This presents an opportunity to fundamentally rethink and re-tool how we work and build products, and provide our customers with intelligent, time-saving solutions that seamlessly fit into their workflows, ultimately transforming the way businesses operate and succeed in the modern marketplace. With these new AI capabilities, we’re shifting towards a data rich, insights driven experience for our customers.”
With Cin7 ForesightAI, your ability to predict demand, reorder stock, and manage your inventory will infinitely improve.
AI-driven sales forecasts have never been easier, and they give you the power to see into the future (at least, into the next 24 months). You’ll also enjoy customization through manual adjustments and the ability to filter your products by warehouse, product category, or individual product–even if you have multiple warehouses! The result is optimized stock levels, a decrease in your working capital by at least 25% (through the elimination of unnecessary stock), and the ability to speculate on the capacity of your warehouse or fulfillment center, thus freeing up space or enabling you to buy more inventory.
Intelligent product segmentation helps you focus your attention on products based on profitability or sales volume. Instead of hoping for the best, you can confidently know whether products are Winners (best sellers that should be kept in stock), Chasers (products that attract customers but may not be rushing out the door), or Losers (stock that’s not moving, taking up space you don’t have and costing you money you don’t want to spend). With this critical information, you can be a winner yourself by easily identifying which products are driving or putting the brakes on your growth.
With smart replenishment optimization, you’ll be able to see the risk level for stock-out of different items at different points in time, and you’ll have access to a purchase forecast graph that shows how much you’ll need to order and when. Additionally, you can auto-generate POs as well as combine orders based on suppliers. The benefits include seamless management of your POs and inventory, reduced administrative workload and manual error, and streamlined reordering process with up to 99% product availability.
Smart, right?
So, what’s the takeaway?
In a nutshell, managing inventory with stressful manual counts, spreadsheets, and gut feelings is being replaced with worry-free automation and AI. Embracing inventory automation spikes operational efficiency, cost savings, and higher sales volumes—not your cortisol. The team at Ecolife Solutions is happy they got the memo.
Ecolife Solutions, a family-run company which provides sustainable insulation products, was growing by leaps and bounds. Sadly (but not surprisingly) their manual inventory processes couldn’t keep up.
“[Before Cin7], there was no system for inventory or production. It was an entirely paper-based system,” says Kirthi Chauhan, CFO, Ecolife Solutions.
The decision to implement Cin7 had them quickly ditching weeks-long stock takes in favor of completing them in hours and gaining real-time visibility into their daily operations. They also enhanced their ability to:
“We’ve grown by about 20% in order volume. We can process a lot more orders per day with less effort,” says Kevin Bracken, General Manager, Ecolife Solutions. “Adding another million dollars in sales a month would not be a whole lot more effort in terms of process. We can seamlessly integrate a new warehouse into everything that we have.”
Less effort, huge gains. That’s the beauty of automation and AI. To learn the many ways Cin7’s automation can help your business thrive, request a demo today.
