While textile manufacturers in India face many challenges, inventory management issues are the most common yet highly chaotic. An inventory management system ensures that the right products are sent to the right buyers at the right time. It essentially improves and reorganizes the two important stages of textile selling and exports: warehousing and shipping. Inventory management helps meet buyers’ demands more effectively, but incorrect stock levels, overselling, dead stock, and long lead times can lead to lost sales and dissatisfied customers. Woven and nonwoven material suppliers must recognize these frequently occurring problems and use modern solutions to tackle them.
Here are common Inventory Management problems faced by textile manufacturers and how to beat them.
1. Inability to Forecast Demand
Accurate forecasts offer a strategic advantage. Demand forecasting is crucial to prevent production delays and additional expenses. Essentially, it’s vital for maintaining the equilibrium between supply and demand. If executed poorly, these errors can disrupt sales and planning, leading to financial setbacks.
Integrate advanced and easily customizable inventory management software with your accounting and sales data to predict demand and schedule orders based on buyers’ preferences, stock availability, and seasonal trends.
2. Excessive Obsolete Inventory
Too much inventory can result in dead or forgotten stock. Your warehouse may become cluttered with outdated goods that cannot be sold for various reasons, resulting in losses.
To prevent this, identify slow-moving, expired, and obsolete stock and remove it from your inventory, even if it means providing huge discounts on those orders and selling them at a loss.
3. Changing Buyers’ Demand
Textile manufacturers in India should ideally hold enough stock to meet buyers’ changing demands, including on- and off-season sales. However, circumstances can easily alter buyers’ requests. For instance, a high ICE cotton price could increase the demand for modal or synthetic fabrics.
As a solution, you must keep track of market trends and changing laws and regulations. With TEXbulletin’s news updates, woven and non woven fabric suppliers can better understand the textile industry and make decisions based on statistics and information.
A free subscription to TEXbulletin will help you receive daily news updates on the stock market, yarn & cotton prices, economy, banking and finance, market indexes, and other news related to the textile industry right to your email every day.
For Free Subscription, WhatsApp “TEXBULLETIN” to +91 9810401045.
4. Inaccurate Stock Data and Analysis
Understanding future buyers’ purchasing decisions and ensuring adequate inventory is crucial for demand forecasting.
Poor demand management and inadequate stock levels can result from any inaccuracies in data inputs or forecasting algorithms.
5. Unable to Track Inventory in Real Time
Many manufacturers rely on outdated methods or tools, such as spreadsheets, for tracking inventory and dispatch. This can lead to missing or stolen items, unexplained delays, or cargo loss.
Manual entries can lead to human errors and inaccuracies. The biggest challenge in manual inventory tracking is keeping track of the current stock level and also following what’s shipped and what’s to be shipped across multiple sales channels.
Embracing technology or implementing a reliable and automated inventory management system to track, locate, and monitor the movement of stock in real time across all phases of the supply chain can significantly improve inventory tracking and offer real-time solutions.
6. Delays in Reordering
When textile manufacturers sell products via TEXchange, they need to ensure they have enough stock to meet demand. This means restocking their inventory after an order is complete and recognizing when restocking is necessary.
However, it is not as simple as it sounds. Business owners must also consider lead time – the duration between placing an order and receiving the items at the warehouse for distribution.
If you delay the reordering process, it can extend the lead time, leading to zero stock at the warehouse. This can create issues like product out-of-stock and might create a gap between customer orders and dispatch time.
Delays like this in the textile industry can result in lost sales or customer dissatisfaction.
Real-time tracking through an inventory management system can streamline operations and improve lead time without causing dead stocks.
7. Multi-Channel Confusions
Having an omnichannel presence is a must for manufacturers and sellers. It opens new business avenues globally and maximizes profits. However, without a reliable inventory management system, selling across multiple channels can create chaos.
As you add more channels, especially those where customers can place orders independently, it can be difficult to keep everything in order. The challenge is synchronizing inventory data across various platforms or sales channels.
A tailored inventory management software system can help you gain a comprehensive view of all sales channels in one place, enabling you to identify the specific channels generating the highest sales. Real-time forecasting will further enable you to efficiently control inventory across all locations and sales points.
