The latest Clarity™ retail inventory management software revision was developed in response to requests from the market where retailers are having trouble responding to orders placed online and wanting to be picked up in their stores. With inventory accuracy commonly below 70%, retailers are struggling to execute without significant risk of disappointing customers.
In most of today’s retail operations, if a customer places an order online, retailers require a minimum inventory over stock position of five for each item to confirm for customers to pick up from the store. This is because retailers simply aren’t confident in their inventory accuracy.
Once the order is placed, it’s up to an associate to find the item on the sales floor. “The ‘item not found’ rate is high,” senior vice president of supply chain transformation for Target, Karl Bracken, mentioned at the Internet Retailer 2016 Conference & Exhibition in Chicago. “Some stores had to cancel up to 50% of online orders because they couldn’t find a product in the store.”
Clarity™ 3.6 Paves the Way for True Omnichannel
The latest version of SML’s comprehensive cloud-based software suite, Clarity™ 3.6, simplifies retail RFID deployment to put real-time management of inventory in the associates’ hands. Clarity™ integrates with a retailers Online Order Management (OMS) and exposes accurate in-store inventory up to the OMS so that the OMS can determine what the best approach to filling the customer’s order is. Because Clarity provides visibility for the entire network of stores and is as real-time as possible, the OMS can now have rules that drive decisions on fulfilling orders.
Making the decision as to the fulfillment option is only half the job, though – an order for picking the order needs to be communicated to the stores. Clarity™ enables the orders to show up on a tasks list, and associates in the stores can then use the RFID technology to go find the specific items needed to be picked for the specific omnichannel order and set those aside for the customer to pick up.
Not only does Clarity™ help find the item for omnichannel, but the single most important process in a retail store – replenishment of the sales floor with the right product – is also automated by the latest features. Intelligent Replenishment delivers numerous sensor supports for associates to help them find the items needed on the sales floor. These include: sounds, text, meters, automated workflows and pictures. We currently have a number of retailers using this feature – unique to SML – and it is streamlining the transitionally manual process. The new Clarity™ 3.6 product functionality is currently deployed at several retailers and has been formally released on Zebra RFID RFD8500 handhelds on both Android and iOS terminals.