For small businesses, visibility opens the door to better inventory management strategies

Managing inventory can be a sore spot for many small businesses. If done right, it can boost cash flow. But if done poorly (or manually), it can quickly drain resources.  While supply chain/inventory managers do their best to meet demand by fulfilling orders expediently, their job is increasingly complicated by the addition of new sales channels at one end of the supply chain and multiple inventory locations (i.e. stores, warehouses, suppliers, third-parties logistic providers, etc.) at the other.

Your large competitors have made significant investments into technology that optimizes inventory across the enterprise and have become inventory management experts. For example, these guys can take an order online and fulfill it from any location. They gather store inventory, warehouse inventory and even supplier inventory into one intelligent system. Their management system then splits inbound orders and routes them to where the inventory resides, even if that means generating a drop ship purchase order to a supplier. Furthermore, they have built up integrated supply chains so that they don't even own half of the inventory they sell - at least not until they sell it. Even when they have sold it, they still haven't paid for it. The industry calls this Negative Inventory Turns. They have "endless aisles" online, efficiently sending and managing (not carrying) tens of thousands of drop-ship orders to hundreds of suppliers every day. What this means to you is that your competition is saving money through their inventory management strategy - meaning they can offer lower prices and still earn the same margin.  That's a problem.

The key to keeping up with this level of efficiency is inventory visibility. If you are relying on your ERP system for inventory and order management, you can only see part of the picture. ...