Improve Cash Flow & Save Money with AIMS360 Inventory Management

Smart fashion companies know what daily inventory levels look like including future inventory levels. One of the biggest areas of improvement brands can see by using AIMS360’s apparel software is inventory management. At the end of the day, your company invested thousands of dollars in purchasing or producing inventory. So it’s crucial you’re not wasting time and money with dead inventory due to poor inventory management.

What does inventory management mean in AIMS360?

Within AIMS360 apparel business management system, brands can manage inventory in the following ways:

• In multiple warehouses, even if they’re not located near each other. AIMS360 cloud-based system allows you to do so easily.
• With your 3rd Party Logistics (3PL) warehouse management system keep retail and wholesale inventory organized by separating them in a ‘virtual warehouse’ in AIMS360, even though they’re housed in the same physical warehouse.
• Track inventory for all of your retail and wholesale businesses at the same time. For example, E-commerce (i.e Shopify), Point of Sale (POS), EDI (electronic order management with retailers), dropship orders, boutique orders, etc.

What are the different types of inventory the AIMS360 fashion business software track?

AIMS360 will allow tracking of quantities that are in the following status:

• Stock – Inventory of goods that are in one of the warehouses.
• Work in Process (WIP) – Inventory of goods that are in production in your factory or at a vendor’s factory.
• Orders – Quantities in the order state that need to still be picked or shipped.
• Picked – Inventory of goods in picking status, waiting for the warehouse to ship it out.
• Shipped – Quantity of goods that have been shipped out.

How Can AIMS360 Apparel Software Help with Inventory Management?

There are three main modules you’ll use often for inventory management in AIMS360 fashion ERP:

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. Style Module (Style Master)
               1. 1. WMS module (Warehouse Management System)
               1. Intelligent Allocation

Style Module

The Style module manages each style with corresponding colors and sizes for that style. Within this module, you can easily access the Style Summary Stock Report to check the stock per warehouse by style, color, and/or size.

Best Practice: To cut inventory waste even further, AIMS360 users should utilize the Production Forecasting report. This report will take into account your sales and stock count. More importantly, you’ll know best-performing styles to help you determine which ones to reproduce.

Warehouse Management System (WMS) Module

If you have several warehouses in different locations (ex. You have a warehouse in NY and in LA), you can use the WMS module. It’s designed to help you keep track of inventory levels at all of your warehouses easily.

Let’s say your yellow moto jacket is selling quickly on your e-commerce store. You need to make sure the warehouse it’s fulfilling from has enough units of the item. In addition, you can make an inventory transfer within your AIMS360 system to ensure the minimum amount of units is always stocked in the correct warehouse.

Communication is key! For each inventory transfer, you can export a report and provide it to the warehouse manager so the warehouse team can start physically transferring the inventory.

As your warehouse(s) receives your vendor POs, there are tools to either receive the inventory by either confirming or using a barcode scanner. If you’re using a third party warehouse (3PL), an integration will upload the information into your AIMS360 software. Your inventory and pick tickets will automatically transfer between your AIMS360 system and your 3PL’s WMS. 

You can share inventory across wholesale and retail. Another solution is to create a virtual warehouse to easily separate your goods without actually having to physically separate it. You can create a ‘virtual warehouse’ to keep your retail and wholesale inventory separate in the AIMS360 system, even though they’re housed in the same physical warehouse.

Best practice: Setting a minimum on your styles may help to ensure you always have inventory for your top selling styles and prevent fulfillment and potential delivery delays. As an example, if you set a minimum of 100 units of a blue shirt, AIMS360 provides production reports that allow you to ensure you always have 100 units of this style.

Intelligent Allocation

Moreover, with our Intelligent Allocation module, users can auto-allocate their existing or incoming Work In Progress (WIP) stock to customer orders. This eliminates customer service nightmares by assigning inventory to orders so that they don’t get used elsewhere.

Once that happens, you can get a better idea of all of your inventory regardless of their production status. Delayed shipping will be a thing of the past!

You can set intelligent rules to prioritize these allocated goods. There are over a dozen rules including order dates, ship windows, customer priorities, wholesale/retail, payment type, and more.

For more information get a free demo or contact hello@aims360.com.

Our robust apparel business management software offers hundreds of features including managing customers, orders, EDI, and more. Get a better idea of what we do by signing up for a free demo and consultation call.