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Chris Reddick (President and CEO at Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) continue their discussion about multi-warehouse eCommerce platforms and how they can help manage and transfer inventory.

Part 3 of a 4-part series (Return to Part 2)

RON: It can even go one step further once you start getting into the notifications for—and that's where we are here on this next slide—when we're talking about transferring inventory and B2B inventory management. Now that we have either the EDI in place, or maybe we don't have the EDI in place, the notifications become even more important because I have to manually go in and either bulk through import and or just manual go into our UI and update the inventory accounts. 

Like you said, for some of the smaller vendors that are getting into the game that don't have the EDI capabilities yet, or the straight direct eCommerce API integration capabilities, they can't run out of inventory. So inventory notifications, how do we let them know that—in the scenario I gave a minute ago that Denver was running low—what is a low stock account? What is a typical purchase size of the group purchasing organization, so that I can let them know that they've run out or that they're running out and they need to transfer inventory.  

This transfer inventory one's a really interesting one. I'd love you to go into the technicality of it. Obviously, part of it is the last bullet here, where we talk about the different rate quotes. The scenario I gave, how much was it going to cost to ship 10,000 from Denver versus waiting and getting them from Seattle? Is it free from Seattle, since I'm getting a full train load and I can fit all 70,000 on a train and I have to pay for a train anyway? If I'm getting a full train car that can fit up to 100,000, then anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 costs the same, well then, it's a lot cheaper to get from Seattle. 

If I know that I can save whatever that cost is to ship them all from Seattle, can I deal with the extra one day, or three days, or five days that it's going to take instead of getting some of them from Denver?  So really understanding and knowing what those estimated delivery times and accurate quotes would be is very important. 
 
What I'd really love for you to talk about is, you mentioned a scenario right when we started the webinar, but we didn't give an example of it yet. So I want to go in and give an example. You mentioned a scenario where people might want to have, even within a single warehouse, managing multiple inventory counts. The typical one, we talked about just a second ago about the railroad ties transferring inventory between locations. 

We [should] talk about kitting and breaking kits and assemblies. And that's something that can be very instrumental in helping you sell, especially when it comes to promoting. [For example], when it comes springtime and you want to sell pool floaties, do you put them in a bundle, a whole “Get Ready for Spring” pack at Costco? And for 300 bucks you can buy three beach balls and it's got a set of towels and it's got all the stuff bundled together. But you want to make sure you have enough for this promotion. So you might break out some of that inventory from your standard towel inventory location and move that over based on the sales you think you might be getting from the promotions of the “Get Ready for Spring”. 
 
So I'd love for you to dive in a little bit about how you can manage those multi-warehouse locations and how you can build kits and break kits apart. Especially when it comes to inventory runs and manufacturing, because we're dealing with a lot of that type within buying groups especially.  

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CHRIS: This is a really detailed aspect. And again, like you said, Ron, we’ll give an example here. But I also want to encourage folks to see this as an opportunity to think about your scenario and how you might be able to think about edge cases and how to handle those. Many of our clients that have physical locations where customers can visit, or maybe multiple countries where they are providing fulfillment, are going to tend toward having this concept of transferring inventory within multi-warehouses. 
 
Now, this is a pretty standard concept, especially if you're running an ERP and you are transferring between different locations. This is just a standard thing that you're probably used to. But one of the challenges with this is, whenever we're dealing with presenting where things are on the site, what the status of their order is, and being able to see if, like you said, Ron, they can break something out and get access to something that's in a kit as individual items. 
 
What we typically will do is, whenever someone's placing an order—and let's just go through an example and say somebody is placing an order for, let's say, kitchen equipment. And the kitchen equipment is somewhat complex. It's a buying group order and we have ten different companies that are purchasing. Six of those are actually different franchise groups within an overall franchise organization. And the other four are just individual restaurant groups. So, these ten different purchasers, six from a single franchise, but they're all different franchise owners. They're all making a big purchase, and two of them are opening new stores that have to be open in two weeks. They need these things right away. 
 
Well, there's a scenario here where we want to be able to take advantage of the group purchase. Now, this may be a little bit extreme, but just for sake of example, we may have a distribution center in the US and then we have a manufacturing facility that's producing most of these items in Taiwan. And then we may also have another manufacturing facility that's producing these items in Great Britain. 
 
So in those different scenarios, we have a hundred different items that are being purchased. Well, ten of those are actually available right now in the US distribution center, but they're part of the kit that is an overall kitchen set. And these restaurateurs, they need these items within two weeks or they can't open their facility. What we need to be able to do is transfer the inventory, break the kits out in that distribution center, and have that capability of seeing into those kits that the items that these restaurants need are part of the kit and can be broken out. 
 
The other thing would be transferring the inventory, possibly from that broken out kit, back to Taiwan so that it can be built out into a full set again or, possibly, producing more items from the originating location in Taiwan and transferring it to that distribution center to remake the kit and then being able to represent this properly in the ERP configuration from an accounting perspective. 

Now, these distribution centers, they may have an integration system that's different from the ERP that runs your business overall. And then the manufacturers may also have a different ERP system. So we need to be able to properly transfer the information about where the inventory is located, who has ownership of it on their books, and how are we reconciling that responsibility? 

Continue to Part 4 to learn about managing multi-warehouse and retail locations.

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