Introduction
Traditionally, management of clothing store products has been implemented through physical counts that involve repetitive processes of folding and organizing. The manual stock management procedure is cumbersome and prone to errors hence the need for automation of the process to replace the human workers with cost effective technologies. The manual systems are not user friendly besides being time consuming and hence the implementation of an automated inventory management system will help in providing asset visibility, facilitate prompt delivery of products,redue lead time, shelf space and overall operation costs (Alyahya, Wang & Bennett, 2016) . An automated inventory management system will help streamline the sales process while at the same time measuring shrinkage and improving the shopping experiences of customers.
Importance of information to logistics and supply chain management
Effective inventory management systems will improve utilization of information, which, has proved to be beneficial to the logistics and supply chain management by:
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Increased visibility and knowledge over the entire supply chain thereby enabling for the replacement of inventory with information.
Information also helps in improving coordination of activities between the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution structures through the effective use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Information is also critical in increasing awareness of the customer needs and demands through analysis of data collected through point-of-sale thereby improving logistics planning and reduction of variability within the supply chain.
Information helps in the coordination of logistics to streamline order processing to reduce lead times.
Data mining involves the use of mathematical tools to examine existing data sets with the aim of extracting any patterns (correlation), rules and new information (Atieh et al., 2016) . Data mining can be used to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of inventory management. Through the identification and analysis of data from different perspectives, data mining can be used to identify the needs of customers thereby allowing for customization of goods and services to meet this needs thereby improving customer experiences. Data mining can also be used to predict future trends based on past or current occurrences.
The primary concerns for companies hesitating to adopt the automated inventory system technology lie in the high costs associated with installing the required software and hardware to support enterprise management systems. Effective decisions by the clothing store manager should be focused on lowering the costs of inventory management and this can directly influence the financial performance of the business organization by increasing the ability to do more with fewer resource requirements (Johnson & Ruankaew, 2017) . Well-executed inventory management accuracy programs and reduced inventory shrinkage can be used to increase financial gains to the business organization. Financial hurdles may motivate application of strategic inventory decisions. Thereby, considering the feasibility of using manual laborers if it is cheaper compared to purchasing and managing of one’s inventory.
In global service provision, adopting such a strategy would affect deployment of inventory and the feasibility of investing in technological inventories. Implementing just-in-time system can help reduce the need for investing in expensive inventory with preference on outsourcing cheaper inventory solutions thereby reducing the expenses on inventory and subsequent increase in net income.
Required Equipment
Inventory management system includes both hardware and software-based tools that are used in the tracking of inventory and transmission of data. Electronic data interchange (EDI) is critical to inventory management especially relating to logistics and automated ordering of goods since it helps provide seamless transmission of information across the business organization structures, i.e. advanced shipping notices, payment electronic transfer of funds and submission of purchase orders. Some of the main benefits of using EDI is increased efficiency since it reduces costs associated with sending invoices, purchase orders, lead times, reduces shipping errors and rates of returning goods. This, in turn, results in higher billing accuracy, customer satisfaction, and productivity. Some of the main drawbacks include high costs associated with the initial set up, lack of awareness on the benefits associated with its use and electronic system security threats and compatibility issues between software used and hardware.
The standardized inventory management for small-scale clothing store requires three key equipment:
Electronic tags
Scannable bar codes
Sensors
The scannable UPC bar code tags will allow for real time stock management (tracking), pricing provision on specific items with the option of implementing price checks and sales discounts on specific products. At the same time, the electronic tags will help deal with losing of inventory especially through theft.
Operational Concept
The inventory management system is designed as a real time system capable of tracking inventory within a single store with the capability of being scaled to connect multiple stores. For simplicity of the currently proposed system, the main functionalities supported should include recording of sales and the prompting of restocking notifications of specific products. Further functionalities that can be supported may include report generation.
System Requirements
The inventory can use a web-based interface that can be used to show inventory data to the stock management teams. Due to limitations in costs, open-source software will be used. JavaServer Pages servlet that is hosted by Apache web-based server of any operating system. The web interface of the stock manager client allows the manager to be able to view the available stock at any given time with added capability of searching or sorting the available products. At the same time, the stock manager client allows the manager to customize application settings i.e. changing the frequency at which the inventory scans and reports are generated, security setting, and email notifications threshold. However, to avoid high costs associated with automatically updating inventory based on the bar codes on the clothing products, new inventory will be manually updated.
Computer System Requirements
HP Slimline 260 Desktop
Core i7 6700 T 2.8 GHZ: Turbo 3.6 and 8 Cores
16 GB of random access memory (RAM)
1 TB of Hard Drive Space
A network infrastructure needs to be implemented to allow for setting up of a private network that supports the HTTP/HTTPS protocol since the inventory management system is web-based. A bandwidth of 10Mbps is recommended to support the deployment on a small-scale level with an option of increasing in accordance with the frequency of transactions. MySQL database management system will be used in storing and management of the inventory data.
The cash registered will be customized with an emulated cash register that can be used to interface the actual registers with an alternative of using commercially licensed products; although, they might increase the overall cost of implementing the inventory system (Atieh et al., 2016) .
References
Alyahya, S., Wang, Q., & Bennett, N. (2016). Application and integration of an RFID-enabled warehousing management system–a feasibility study. Journal of Industrial Information Integration , 4 , 15-25.
Atieh, A. M., Kaylani, H., Al-abdallat, Y., Qaderi, A., Ghoul, L., Jaradat, L., & Hdairis, I. (2016). Performance improvement of inventory management system processes by an automated warehouse management system. Procedia Cirp , 41 , 568-572.
Johnson, F., & Ruankaew, T. (2017). A study of inventory control systems by Jamaican SMEs in retail and manufacturing/distribution industries. International Journal of Business and Management , 12 (8), 1.
