Management of Products' Inventory Status

Abstract

When there are sales opportunities through calls or promotional events, inventory status are key to enable salesperson to reserve the products enabling the closing of a sale by quickening the customer decision. During the time when a sale is made and existing inventory was drawn down if the customer decided to change to a different product, the salesperson will have to make changes and book the other product that the customer changed to. In many situations, the salesperson forgot to remove the previous product reservation. When there are many of similar field sales situation, the sales persons in the field would have difficulty in knowing if the inventory status of products is accurate before committing to the customers. There are times when the products are drawn for demo purpose after which this product should not be part of the main inventory tagged with the same retail price. In this project the student looked into an efficient process that could provide accurate products‟ inventory status to the salespersons. Some of the product inventory “paper” statuses are due to movement such as reservation, cancellation and changing to other product or its configuration and a non-sale draw-out for demo or loan purpose. A prototype was developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the process with consideration of a field inventory database and a central inventory database.