How inventory managers win with analytics in Cin7

Now that you’ve identified the correlation between data analytics and better inventory management, are you getting the whole truth and nothing but the truth from yours?

We take a deep dive into in Cin7's analytics features and explain how to enhance them to meet your business objectives.

Why inventory managers need analytics

As anyone dealing with large stock volumes, especially across multiple locations, knows: keeping track of the numbers that matter is a key piece in your success puzzle. Analyzing inventory data is exactly like asking your most important questions:

How do you reduce waste?

How do you reduce storage costs?

How do you improve cost efficiency in operations?

How do you avoid or reduce missed sales opportunities?

How do you ensure customer satisfaction and protect brand reputation?

How do you stay competitive and profitable?

How do you scale and drive growth?

Your data will spill its guts. Analysis produces business intelligence (BI), which demonstrates if and how your business is hitting its KPIs:

• if your carrying costs of inventory, stock-out rates and Days Sales of inventory are tracking lower;
• if your inventory turnover and gross margin return on inventory interest are inching higher; and
• if your marketing campaigns are meeting their strategic goals.

Ultimately, you'd want to pull together all data from the various tools involved in running your business to help you mitigate overstock, optimize inventory levels, streamline your supply chain, and predict future demand.

Accurate analytics, please

What is inventory analytics without accurate data? A bit toothless, to be honest. You want to know which products to stock up on, in what quantities, as well as the quality of the products you have in stock. You want to forecast demand as accurately as possible, which must factor historical sales data into the calculation.

Accuracy comes from real-time tracking and analysis of sales trends. There's no better way to anticipate dips and spikes in demand, so you can adjust stock levels correctly. When data is live and instantly updated in real time, you're able to respond quickly, almost immediately, to inventory requirements and availability issues. Finally, the accuracy of your data depends on your ability to incorporate the impact of different parts of your business, including vendors and service providers.

Only blending data from your business toolkit will provide a holistic overview and generate correct analyses. This might sound like a job for expensive data experts. Fortunately, you can achieve your business objectives by enhancing the native analytics features in Cin7.

Building on Cin7 analytics features

You’re most likely using Cin7 for its integrated, cloud-based inventory management prowess with automated Point of Sale, warehouse management, and centralized e-commerce features. Add suppliers, finances and marketing to the pot and you’ve got a smorgasbord of multi-source data laden with potentially actionable insights.

A quick dip into your Cin7 features

It’s a useful tool for scaling operations and maintaining focus on procurement and stock management. As an Omni user, you’ll find the tool’s ability to work across multiple channels to track products and sales orders a great fit for your business.

If you’re on one of the Pro or Advanced plans, you’ll have sound real-time inventory tracking and order processing capabilities. It’s good at multi-location inventory tracking too, although it stumbles just a bit when syncing with certain tools to update stock levels. As some users have experienced and shared with us, they miss the magic that pushes their analytics to the next level.

Room for improvement in Cin7 analytics

Whether it’s due to changes in business software or the addition of new tools to the mix, migrating data can be a time-consuming pain in the BI. This is true for some Cin7 users too who highlight synchronization issues between Cin7 and Shopify for product data. Others highlight syncing sales data back to Hubspot in order to track performance of their sales team, or connecting Xero data with sales staff info in Cin7. It also turns out that Cin7 offers integrations with accounting systems Xero and QuickBooks only.

We’ve heard of users raising the concern of data accuracy during the transfer of financial data.

The lack of detailed breakdowns for fees and the need for manual reconciliation have been highlighted as areas needing improvement. - TrustRadius

We hear your moans and groans. The idea of manual intervention and its inherent risk of errors make us cringe too.

Some users experience issues with the integration process, while others note a lack of essential standard reports and analytics to meet their particular requirements. In one instance, despite using Cin7 to record payments, another user complained about being unable to run AR aging reports.

As for wanting some flexibility in how you calculate certain things, that’s a cry for freedom to customize. It takes a BI tool capable of advanced analytics to score that kind of freedom. More than that, it needs to work seamlessly with Cin7 and all the other software tools that keep your business wheels turning. And it must be able to report on everything and anything you need.

Enhancing Cin7 analytics features

Advanced data analytics are not a nice-to-have. The fact that it tells you exactly what you need to know about your business, makes it an inventory management must-have. Cin7’s analytics capabilities could use some enhancements to be fit for purpose.

A partnership with Wink Reports

When you hit that Cin7 ceiling, you’ll find room to expand on report customization in Wink that actually fits your business model. You’ll be able to create custom reports that meet your specific tracking and planning requirements. No lengthy setup process to navigate and no manual fiddling with data calculations.

See for yourself how straightforward it is to connect your Cin7 Core or Cin7 Omni to Wink.

Hang ten while we retrieve your data. Then access the report builder and start creating your own reports.

Connect to advanced analytics

That takes care of any setup concerns. Need data from different software tools to combine to generate unique insights? Bonus feature: over 25 software integrations available in Wink. This allows you to merge multi-source data and blend reports. So, you’ll always have the right, most up-to-date info from across your business.

Still worried about accuracy during data migration? One of our drum beats is: No data left behind! We automatically pull through your historical data and the data from your business tools. There’s no limit on data volumes, and not a whiff of human error. It’s done for you, so you don’t have to get your hands dirty.

All the metrics you can track

Worried about that AR aging report? When we said you can report on anything and everything, we weren’t kidding.

From your Cin7 Core account, you can track a host of metrics including invoice lines, opportunities, product availability, purchase inventory movements, sale fulfillments ship lines, etc. BI is all about visualizing data in a user-friendly dashboard. You can hit the ground running with our ready-made Cin7 sales performance dashboard. We also have a Cin7 client receivables by salesperson report template conveniently set up for you. These are great time-savers. Adapt your analytics using a range of available filtering options.

From your Cin7 Omni account, you can track metrics like branch transfers, credit note items, production job products, sales order lines, stock, and more. If you visit Wink’s template gallery, you’re sure to find a reporting template that poses your most burning questions. Alternatively, it’s just as easy to create the custom reports your business needs.

An essential addition to what Cin7 already does for you

The ability to master multi-organization reporting and data integration without all the setup and maintenance complexities you’ve come to expect, is well within reach. The fact that Wink is industry-specific makes it a well-suited, lightweight add-on to your native Cin7 data analytics.

It boils down to flexible, Excel-style reporting on steroids, with complex formulas and pivot tables, the works! The insights produced are easy to view, understand, and apply. Except, you don’t need (to be) a data analyst extraordinaire to use the tool or make sense of the numbers. Unlike other BI tools, there’s no query writing or manual data analysis required. So, no tech skills required, and no need to upskill your entire staff. Just advanced analytics you can share that answer any questions you throw at it.

Sign up to Wink Reports. Track the metrics to run the reports to gain the insights to make informed decisions ;)