Inventory Planner

Inventory Planner makes it easy to forecast inventory, create purchase orders, predict when product will run out, and generally keeps a pulse on your product inventory.

You can also see what products you have on overstock, which products aren't moving, and therefore which products to consider liquidating via a flash sale or marketing campaign.

Very beneficial pricing structure. The forecasting is great. Being able to understand replenishment timelines by supplier. Create multiple purchase orders easily.

Inventory Planner's main metrics are:

Cash flow / Amount of time product's are out of stock / Warehouse overhead (also margin).

Ancillary benefits: Inventory Planner saves a ton of time for your operations team, over using spreadsheets.

This is a tool for operations, sourcing, merchandising, and purchasing teams. It should be used by your head of operations, head of eCommerce, sourcing and merchandising teams, and you even want to bring in someone from your marketing team, to discuss overstock and aging inventory and how to liquidate it.

Setup can be a bit difficult. But they have a customer success manager that will walk you through it. You could be up and running on day 1, but there is a lot more that you can do, that could take a bit more time. You may need to go product by product, set up your known metrics, and some predictions about vendor timelines - if the vendor says they have 14 day lead times but really have 21 days.

Bonus, you can see that in Inventory Planner's report because Inventory Planner sees the purchase order creation date and close date.

You can expect to spend a few hours a week in the tool, going up from there depending on how many purchase orders you do a month.

If you are neck deep in excel spreadsheets, writing purchase orders by hand or by updating a Word doc, or if you keep running out of stock on key products, Inventory Planner is for you.

If you don't have a dedicated operations manager, you only place a few purchase orders a year, you don't plan on growing your SKU count, or you don't do much sales volume, this tool wouldn't be as beneficial for you.