Innovation Unleashed: Supercharging Legacy Systems with Inventory Efficiency

In July 2024, many airline passengers across the United States found themselves stranded after a Crowdstrike outage caused the cancellation of thousands of Delta, American, Spirit, Frontier, United, and Allegiant flights. Southwest Airlines was the big airline able to keep flying without a hitch, thanks to the fact that they run on Windows 3.1—a 32-year-old operating system.

Despite Southwest and customers appreciating the fact that they could continue on with their busy lives and schedules that day, everyone knows dependence on Windows 3.1 is not something to boast about. Southwest customers only have to think back to the last time they were in a tough situation at the gate counter, waiting as the worker tried to rectify the situation on the computer. Now we know why it was always a long and frustrating process.

We as customers know that the 32-year-old technology is not capable of delivering the best experience, the best efficiency, or the best solutions, but many businesses continue, year after year, to avoid addressing the need for change.

For retail businesses running on older tech stacks, there is, however, an alternative to the dreaded “ripping and replacing” of technology, a solution that enables them to increase inventory efficiency with any tech stack.

An Entirely Different Approach to Outdated Systems

If replacing existing technology was easy, businesses would all be doing it as soon as issues arise with their current technology. However, change management is often a long and challenging process that can disrupt operations, necessitate additional training, and put a strain on time and resources. This causes many retailers to continue using outdated technology.

Within inventory management, legacy systems often lead to inefficiencies, difficulty accurately meeting consumer demand, and increased costs and waste. Retailers find themselves trying to solve their dilemmas reactively, not proactively, because they lack the appropriate tools. The effects can be visible to the customer in the way of stockouts, delayed order fulfillment, and potentially increased prices to cover the cost of inefficiencies.

In a perfect world, businesses would keep in lockstep with the latest technology, but we all know that is not realistic. The cost, both in terms of money and disruption to operations, makes frequent overhauls impractical. Businesses need a solution that balances the need for modern capabilities with the realities of their existing systems.

Fortunately, technology has evolved to address this challenge in inventory management, not as another system that businesses must implement but as a solution that works alongside what they already have. This solution comes in the form of a layer at the top of their tech stack that eliminates the need to rip and replace.

Bringing Inventory Efficiency to Retailers’ Legacy Systems

A solution that sits atop the existing tech stack has the benefit of “seeing” all underlying systems. It can gather data from disparate sources, cleanse the data, synchronize, and structure it to ensure it contributes toward the overarching goal.

In the case of inventory management, this goal is optimized decision-making within allocation, restocking, and returns. Retailers can make the best decisions for every SKU, across and within multiple channels, for overall increased efficiency. Smarter allocation decisions help products be available where and when they are needed most. Restocking benefits from a forward-thinking approach, taking historical and live data to reduce the risk of stockouts and overstock, while returns are reintegrated optimally to improve turnover.

3 Parts to Supercharging Legacy Systems with Inventory Efficiency

At Dropit, we believe there are three essential parts to solving inventory efficiency challenges for retailers—advanced machine learning, a live view of inventory, and unified inventory optimization.

Advanced Machine Learning

With the technology available today, any solution striving for the goal of inventory optimization must lean on advanced machine learning. People can’t uncover the insights that machine learning models can, or certainly not at scale. Dropit’s machine learning models continually improve to narrow the gap between what was planned for and what actually occurs—what customers actually purchase and keep or return.

Live View of Inventory

Next, is the importance of a live view of data, which unfortunately, is not a given for many retailers. Some systems in their tech stack update multiple times a day, others much less frequently. How can retailers make accurate decisions if those decisions hinge on inventory available in one data source, only to find out when it updates that the inventory is actually no longer available? This is why Dropit structures and synchronizes data from every source to ensure we’re always working with the absolute latest information.

Unified Inventory Optimization

Finally, retailers must be capable of unified inventory optimization. Decisions are never made in a vacuum. One decision will always impact another. When Dropit takes into account the retailer’s entire ecosystem, they can gain optimal decision-making. Sometimes this involves giving-and-taking—after all, inventory can only be in one place at one time. But this is the challenge within inventory management, and Dropit works to find the optimal solutions in any situation, with any number of variables.

Dropit Elevates Any Tech Stack

Dropit makes inventory efficiency easy to achieve, for any tech stack. Our integrated layer design allows retailers to modernize at their own pace without the growing pains typically associated with technology change.

We are a system agnostic solution that enables retailers to improve their inventory efficiency without ripping and replacing technology.

To learn more about how you can increase inventory efficiency with Dropit, schedule a demo with us at https://www.dropit.shop/contact.

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