Draft:Artificial Intelligence and the Evolution of Inventory Management

Overview:

Inventory Management has always been a business operation’s cornerstone since it is one of the main guarantors of customer satisfaction:... Whether managing supplies or processes as an e-commerce, multichannel retailer or brick & mortar, your inventory management goal is to put the appropriate product at the right store when your customer needs it. As your Business grows, managing assets properly requires an inherent inventory management. This will be the catalyst to increase your market shares .

Technology brought new capabilities to automate and digitize inventory management operations. Cloud based solutions, thanks to their accessibility, scalability, and cost effectiveness, took over at the beginning of the 21st century. Nowadays, the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is completely transforming the As-Is solutions and brings more data analytics and foreseeing capabilities. Those technologies take you to the next level and bring new opportunities to improve your customer relationship through a better understanding and controlling of your orders, storage, manufacturing, after sales or whatsoever processes performed to your products value chain within your marketplace . This article is highlighting the evolution of cloud-based inventory management with the AI integration and its impact on both customer satisfaction and businesses operations.

Cloud based inventory management:

Moving from a manual process to a computerized systems during the 20th Century, inventory management evolved to cloud-based solutions that are accessible remotely. Those platforms aim to manage your inventory with a real time access from anywhere as the consequence of main benefits, as listed above.

• Accessibility: The solutions offer remote access and control in addition to managing multiple stores in multiple locations capabilities.

• Scalability: Scaling your business according to your needs on manging your inventory by increasing your storage capacity and the surrounded functionalities without significant additional investments.

• Integration: Seamless integration with other applications, like e-commerce, accounting and so on.

• Cost-effective: High ROI, thanks to the subscription-based pricing model without any investment on software and hardware infrastructure.

• Improve customer Satisfaction: Ensure that the right product is available for the customer when he needs it.

However, cloud-based inventory management systems still rely on predefined patterns and manual tunings and have:

• Limited functionalities: There is no unique solution that feet’s all businesses. New functionalities need to be customised.

• And limited intelligence: Since cloud-based Inventory Management rely on manually collected data and predefined rules and patterns. Therefore, the solution is lucking intelligence for prediction purposes or to automatically adapt to any changes .

Cloud based inventory management solutions will support your business growth by getting a perpetual updating and streamline of your resources and processes for a better understanding and a higher accuracy.

The Emergence of AI in inventory management:

Even though, AI integration to Inventory management fulfil the same goals as any automated inventory management method, it procures new capabilities when making accurate predictions, identifying trends and patterns and automated Decision-Making, thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms . While, the use of AI is still ongoing, it is already changing the field in some keyways as listed below:

• Predictive Analytics: High accuracy future demand prediction through historical and real time data analysis. • Automated Decision-Making: Reduce manual processing needs by implementing automated Decision-Making processes relying on the predictive Analytics models.

• Adaptability: Enhance inventory management strategy effectiveness by adjusting algorithms according to new collected data and adapt them to business dynamics.

• Risk Management: Performs automated risk analysis and predict potential risks related to supply chain and executes mitigation plans to avoid those risks.

However, AI integration has still few drawbacks when it comes to:

• Complexity: Developing and maintaining AI based Inventory Management requires skilled talents in Data science and machine learning • And cost: High-cost solutions due to high expertise and enhanced technologies involved in designing, deploying, and maintaining such platforms.

Effectively, AI represents the latest and most significant technology evolved on this field. It brings a highly intelligence and automation aiming to transform your inventory management to the next level.

The emergence of AI on Cloud-based Inventory Management, despite of their complexity and high cost, brings more benefits to your Business through automated decision-making, predictive analytics, adaptability, and Risk analysis. It is a real paradigm shift on how business operations are managed adding more efficiency, accuracy, and intelligence to processes execution. The use of AI in inventory management is still ongoing and the future is promising, especially when merged with robotics and internet of Things (IoT).

Even though lucking intelligence, Cloud-based Inventory management without AI integration, are still cost-effective solutions with a high ROI, especially for Small and Medium Businesses. Accessibility, scalability, and Integration are the main criterions of a highly effective automated inventory management for your e-commerce, multichannel retailer, or brick & mortar marketplace.