Inventory Insights 2: Leverage VIS Partners

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One way to solve today’s pressing inventory management challenges and supply-chain issues is to outsource the work to a third-party vendor inventory services (VIS) provider. These are white-glove services that take on all the data analysis, sales forecasting, purchasing, and distribution for your retail operations, allowing you to free up resources and focus on your customer experience. Their economy of scale, and ability to forecast inventory needs, can also be extremely useful in getting around supply shortages.

Justin Drage, Vice President of Partner Management at iQmetrix and a former Chief Growth Officer at a VIS supplier, said,​“Using a VIS partner and having regular cadence and insight into what’s happening at the retail stores and what the stores need to stock is incredibly helpful. Let’s say the VIS partner has a purchase order for 10,000 products but 70% of them get stuck at a port. They can look at it and say okay, we’re getting 3,000 of these products, this is when we’re going to get them, and we can see the where the demand is and prioritize sending those items to our VIS clients.”

Priority on Products

This system means that VIS clients not only get the benefit of sales forecasting from the experts, but they also get first priority on products.

Drage added,​“These vendors’ clients are split between customers on a VIS program versus customers that buy via a traditional purchase order or go to the VIS supplier’s website to make a purchase. There’s just no way to forecast the demand for the latter types of customers. But with a VIS program, the supplier can see every day what the customer’s sales trends are looking like, where their needs are, and then take action. The supplier can prioritize their needs and recommend substitutions if necessary. That way, the client is not feeling the brunt of the supply chain issues, and they are not losing as much sales data as those who are more affected by the supply chain fractures we’re encountering.”

It’s not all about in-store inventory, either. Many VIS suppliers also offer Dropship services to radically enhance your product offering and enable you to sell products without ever having to carry the cost and risk of holding the inventory in-store. Check out Inventory Insights 3: Offer Dropship Solutions for more on this.