Five Features Fashion Brands should consider when selecting an Inventory Management solution.

Source: RLM Software.

By: Alex Vallejo, Marketing Manager.

Fashion executives quickly realize that manual processes, spreadsheets, and delays in readily available reporting information are worthless in today’s fast-paced environment. As Fashion businesses begin to see the slightest bit of growth and bring on new staff members, they quickly realize the manual processes they were getting by before impacting them financially.

It is essential to have a single integrated platform to maintain a fast-paced growth rate and not be hindered by limitations in your siloed inventory and accounting systems.

A solution that can easily take your business from Sales Orders to Cash, Production to Cost of Goods Sold, and feed directly into your P&L and Balance sheet is ideal. As you outgrow basic solutions like QuickBooks, and basic inventory management spreadsheets, you need a dynamic single platform solution that gives you visibility across your Sales, Merchandising, Production, Finance, and Warehouse. Ance requirements and earn investor confidence with real-time SaaS and GAAP dashboards and the flexibility to drill into them for what-if scenario planning and forecasting.

Financial leaders at the organization are increasingly expected to be the decision-maker on the accounting portion of the solution and all on the operational end of the business when it comes to managed inventory practices. To do this for a Fashion business, selecting an industry-specific solution with embedded inventory management capabilities and a built-in accounting solution is key to making the company run smoothly.

Here are five must-have features you should be looking for in an Inventory Management solution.

1. It must connect my Sales, Production, and operational teams with the accounting department so everyone can see one record of the same information from the same system.

When data flows seamlessly from your Inventory Management system into the accounting Software for data elements like Factory Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, or Product level information, it eliminates double entry, improves accuracy, and increases efficiency. You need an accounting system that can:

• Provides 3-way matching capabilities between your Factory Order, the amounts received at your warehouse, and the amount you were invoiced for by the vendor.
• Allow your team members to be viewing the transactional information such as Invoices, Orders, Purchase Orders all within the same system.

2. It can handle Weighted Avg. Costing for Inventory valuation

Most Inventory management solutions have significant limitations in general, i.e., You can’t accurately and quickly report on multiple Inventory locations. Production date information doesn’t provide accuracy to when goods come in.

When it comes to Fashion, there are even more complexities than your typical widget being sold. We have many Seasonal Products, Commodity products, and they all may come in multiple Fabrics, Colors, and even different sizes. Your modern accounting system should:

• Handle multiple Inventory locations and give the ability to calculate a Weighted Avg correctly. Cost on repeat Purchase orders from your factory
• The Weighted Avg. should allow you to run more accurate sales registers
• This system should also allow you to properly report on your inventory valuation at any given point in time, meaning past or present.

3. It has Cost actualization functionality which can be applied based on accounts Payable Invoices to your existing Inventory.

Especially in today’s environment, executives and teams responsible for margin rely more than ever on the accounting department to provide them an actualized cost once the bills come in. Your Single Platform Inventory/accounting system should provide:

• The ability to actualize Inventory value and Open Factory purchase values based on accounts payable information
• Allow your production department to enter multiple product lines onto a single Purchase Order.
• Allow you to actualize PO price, Duty, and Freight based on accounts payable Invoice data.
• Update your inventory values for any discrepancies for the PO price, Duty, and Freight values based on the bills that came in from the respective vendors.

4. Comes with out-of-the-box reporting built specifically to handle the multiple dimensions of the Fashion Industry.

Often Financial leaders at a Fashion Organization can focus on more generic systems, not knowing the detailed requirements of the sales, ops, and production departments when it comes to dealing with the fashion Style, Color, Size dimensions, UPCs, and the requirements of how factories want to see this information. The finance executive can show their care for the other team members by selecting a solution they know can cover their needs and solve the many problems the rest of the departments can face when using a non-fashion-specific solution. Your Single Platform Inventory/accounting system should be able to:

• Provide multi-location available to sell reporting out of the box
• Provide Cut to Order capabilities
• Provide Fashion Centric line sheets with analytics and images
• Display information with Sizes going across the page and not just down
• Allow for entry of multiple sizes and colors at once, without adding a separate record for every style color and size. This increases information entry time by more than eight times a product.
• Allows to easily allocate inventory information to customers down to a size level in an efficient manner

5. Can integrate with other Software Vendors and 3PL providers that service much business just like yours

You can take confidence in your choice of solution knowing that other like-minded businesses are not only using that product to manage inventory and accounting functions, but they are also using other standard 3rd party tools across their peers and work with similar service providers.

When choosing to replace or add a new Inventory System for your Fashion brand, consider other common 3rd party solutions that are effective and on-demand to run the back-end business operations and ensure your new choice has features that can communicate well with these solutions.

Your Fashion Inventory and Fashion tech Accounting solution should:

• Have the ability to connect with 3rd party warehouses that are commonly used amongst your peers in Fashion
• Provide options for connecting with 3rd party showroom tools such as Joor, NuOrder, or The new Black
• Also can integrate with common paying solutions available today, such as Bill.com and Concur.

RLM Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Tool with our Warehouse Management System (WMS) Integration: Necessary solutions to enhance Inventory Accounting Management!

With over 40 years of experience, the solutions and professional service resources at RLM Software can help your Fashion brand, Fashion Retailer, or Manufacturer overcome today’s high-demand challenges like supply chain disruption, hidden returns problem, customer compliance, cutting costs, and widening margins.

Communication with your e-commerce retail, wholesaler, and vendors will be less demanding if you embrace the digital transformation of your business operations.

RLM ERP integrates all back-office functions together to create a master data environment and enables optimization through automation. This means that the inventory management system speaks to the order management system, and this, in turn, speaks to the WMS.

Our robust multi-modular cloud-based solution offers a streamlined and integrated system with multi-channel sales, finance, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), warehouse operations management, E-commerce, EDI, and more.

Discover how RLM Apparel Software enables Fashion and sewn-products companies to unleash their full potential by accelerating performance across the entire company as well as the global supply chain.