Using BI as inventory management software

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We still see it, but fortunately less: organizations that still keep their inventory management in an Excel sheet. Time-consuming, error-prone and not up-to-date. And that is why in this blog we will discuss the use of BI as inventory management software.

We could start by dwelling at length on what Business Intelligence and inventory management are, but we're not going to do that. And so we will give you what the meaning is of both terms in one sentence.

Business Intelligence: Collecting data from one's own trading activity and using it to gain strategic and tactical insights and make decisions.

Inventory management (software): This software manages and provides insight into all incoming and outgoing goods and related activities.

Your capital is in your inventory. Valuations for inventory, lead times, inventory differences and margins are therefore important issues for your organization. Providing insight into these matters is a challenge for many organizations, let alone if you want to analyze different article categories, countries or specific orders. It is therefore important to have reliable and insightful inventory data!

Challenge of inventory management in Excel

As mentioned earlier, many organizations still use Excel to provide insight into their inventory management. To gain the above mentioned insights, they should go through the following steps:

1. Collecting all the necessary data for your inventory management;
2. Process these data in the same format;
3. Provide this Excel format with pivot tables so you can visualize the data.

Has the organization finally finished the Excel dashboards, they cannot easily share these dashboard. Sharing of these dashboard is then done via mail or these are put in a central location.

The disadvantages of working in these ways are;

• Processing data in pivot tables is a challenge for many employees;
• Manual work required in Excel;
• Error-prone;
• Takes a lot of time;
• Data residing in multiple systems cannot simply be linked with Excel;
• (Too) much data leads to performance problems.

And that is why dear viewers there is such a thing as Business Intelligence or perhaps even better: Peacock's Inventory Accelerator(indeed, unabashed advertising)

Inventory management with Peacock's BI solution

With Peacock's Inventory Accelerator, you have a standard analysis cube at your disposal anytime, anywhere that includes the entire flow of goods. The dashboards are created in Power BI, so with the push of a button you have everything related to inventory in view for analysis. You will immediately see trends and developments within the inventory process. If you want more information, you can see the underlying transactions with a few clicks. It is also possible to perform margin analyses down to product and order level. In addition to these capabilities, Peacock's BI solution provides benchmarking between items and item groups. You can also perform analyses from the perspective of inventory, location and order information. And because that's not all, you can even very easily share your inventory management dashboards with your colleagues!

Other benefits of your inventory management in Power BI

There are of course a lot of benefits already mentioned above to start doing your inventory management in Power BI. There are also benefits of Power BI that are interesting not only for your inventory management, but also for other areas of your organization, namely:

• By using standard dashboards, employees can easily realize dashboard through drag and drop. They no longer need help from a BI developer.
• You can access the dashboards with your laptop, tablet and phone.
• Easily make complex data visually appealing and create dynamic dashboards.
• Power BI's good integration with other Microsoft products, such as Teams, Excel and Azure Machine learning.
• Because different data architectures can be chosen within Power BI, the fast performance of dashboards is always guaranteed.

When Power BI is combined with Peacock's Inventory Accelerator, you have reliable insights into your inventory management data anytime, anywhere! Curious about our solution? Contact us via the button below.