Before we take a deep dive into the Inventory Management Software development cost and its features, let’s talk about why is it essential. Big industries that are indulged in the supply of finished products and raw materials to various vendors maintain a dedicated database of the finished products and the raw material that they own and develop.
The development of dedicated database management software is required by industries that have businesses on a large scale. Therefore these systems help these business houses in getting a clear picture of the product that has high demand in the market, the product requirement that they possess, and other statistics related to the business operations.
This dedicated system is profoundly known as Inventory Management System. In simple words, it can be understood as the system by which you can manage the movement of the product (i.e. in & out) of the company.
This system monitors the entire functional activities starting the production, and details related to each and every movement is saved in the Inventory Management Software.
Inventory management software can be defined as the process of keeping account of the products stored and sorted by order, and mage it per usage, and based on selling. Thus it can comprise the management of all the raw materials, essentials required to produce a final product, and completed products, in different warehouses and processes of final products.
Moreover, this system is fully functional and well designed which provides a platform to the users where they can get all updated information related to stock, its location, the amount at which it can be sold easily, and most importantly when it can last.
With this type of information, a company can easily avoid risks like storing excessive stock and shortage of stock. These risks can have a great impact on increasing the profitability and scalability of the company.
The ongoing technological development and ever-expanding e-commerce sector have led to the enormous growth of inventory management systems. Enterprises across the board are spending heavily on a solution that can help them track and manage their assets.
Inventory management software is gaining significant popularity, and here are a few facts that reflect the prospects of the same:
Five of the most popular Inventory Management Software available in the market are:
It is an all-in-one inventory solution that helps with inventory management, marketing, tracking, and accounting. It is a cloud-based inventory solution that brings together the financial processes and back-office capabilities on a single dashboard.
Price – It offers a free NetSuite ERP version. The paid version starts at $99/month.
It is one of the best inventory management solutions available in the market. Zoho enjoys seamless integration with a plethora of applications in the Zoho suite. Zoho inventory takes care of forecasting, and inventory tracking and even help in creating invoices and sales orders.
Price – Zoho Inventory solution offers four prices plans:
It is an easy-to-use inventory management solution that offers a comprehensive interface to manage online sales channels, and 3rd-party integrations. Cin7 syncs the online and physical channels to provide efficient order processing. It is a perfect choice for startups and scaled enterprises.
Price – It offers 4 pricing plans
It’s a cloud-based multi-channel inventory management solution that offers a unified interface to manage orders, shipments, and inventory from a single admin panel. It is best suited for managing and tracking small to mid-sized inventory.
Price – It offers a 14-days free trial version. Paid plan pricing is based on sales per month. If you have 100 monthly orders, then it will cost you $60 per month. If you can generate above 10,000 orders then you can ask for a customized plan.
This one is highly preferred by startups and scaled enterprises. It integrates Quickbooks for end-to-end inventory management and inventory automation. It comes with an efficient work order system that allows users to build and share work orders for a wide variety of tasks.
Price – It offers customized pricing plans based on the number of inventory involved. Users can pay $4,395 upfront for lifetime ownership of the solution, thereafter only support and updates charges are to be paid second year onwards.
Businesses prefer a solution that can help them in managing their inventory workflow to carry out operations on schedule and prevent disruptions. There are various phases within the inventory workflow that an enterprise must monitor, including:
The inventory workflow starts with the purchase of goods, it kickstarts a sequential process of inventory lifecycle management. Every business needs to research supplier history, best products, competitive prices, and intended quality. Companies must have adequate amounts of stock, as less inventory may impact the company’s revenue and efficiency.
Once the order is fulfilled and the products arrived, it is time to store them properly. The inventory could be stored in a warehouse, supplies room, or any other space under the possession of an organization. Inventories must be stored in an organized fashion, as it reduces efforts and time to retrieve products and order fulfillment.
In this phase, the products or raw materials are moved from storage to production and then prepared for final delivery. The effectiveness of this phase relies on how efficiently the inventory has been stored.
Every organization must create an effective tracking system, which can help them track the inventory and product movement when items are purchased and shipped to the customers. This enables organizations to examine inventory levels and assures well-timed deliveries.
If organizations have adequate information about real-time stock quantities, then they can reorder the products before they reach a minimum level of availability. This practice prevents stockouts, which can lead to a loss of sales and reputation.
This phase helps organizations in analyzing historical data and metrics to gain actionable insights before making decisions to cater to emerging requirements. Forecasting is a proactive method that fetches historical data to assess the demand and usage fluctuation of the future. This enables management to place stock orders ahead of time and prevent any unexpected event due to stockout.
Complete track of all the products can be maintained well with the help of inventory management software. You can check the availability of the product easily without rushing to the warehouses and can save a lot of time and effort.
If you have your merchandise put away in various areas, it gets hard to oversee, arrange and send the correct items to the correct customers. Having an all-around planned distribution center can assist you in following the accessibility of various items and keep the customers educated about the status of their shipment.
By keeping total track, all things considered, you can avoid losing your customers and diminish the danger of committing regular human detailing errors, for example, incorrect checking of items. Furthermore, with the inventory management software, you can without much of a stretch meet the delivery deadlines. The customers don’t need to wait long for their shipment to arrive.
If the lack of stock is awful for your business, overloading is more awful. With decent Inventory management software, you can follow your genuine stock supplies and re-request at whatever point is important. This will dispense with the wastage of items which thus prompts gigantic totals of cash misfortunes.
With exact responses, on-time delivery, and customized services, certainly will make your customers happy. They will have the option to follow the status of their shipment and won’t face the danger of late notification regarding the unavailability of the item.
This component helps you to streamline your stock with the assistance of essential details like availability, cost, and so on. It empowers you to make choices for each thing depending on their characteristics and can systematically manage them.
This feature permits the tracking of the products that are stored in the store or warehouse by using the barcode, serial number, and tracking number.
For products that are required for stocking, the inventory management system provided the list of the products along with the required quantities. Therefore with the help of this, the manager can get an alert regarding the stock requirement.
The availability of raw materials for starting new production can be known easily by this feature.
By utilizing tools like cost layering, measurements, overhead allocation, and disclosures, users can get an accurate evaluation of stocks in production.
In the situation when the stocks are about to reach their minimum level with the help of this feature, refilling of the supplies can be done on the basis of the defined reorder points.
Barcode scanning of the products is possible with this feature. This electronic exchange of data is possible through barcode scanners or smartphones.
There can be a situation where a company may maintain multiple storage locations. With an inventory management system, proper tracking and management of the availability of the total stock quantity available for business can be done easily.
In order to bring transparency to the movement of goods and materials, a third-party vendor can be integrated with the system.
Many serial numbers can be tracked and managed easily that are recorded permanently in the system from the time they are received till the time they are issued.
The precise location of a particular product present in the warehouse can be known easily without any delay by this feature.
When the inventory level falls below a certain mark point which is defined or set by you. In that case, alerts related to inventory can be made and sent via Email and SMS by using this feature.
The situation of overstock or out-of-stock can be avoided by utilizing this feature as it helps in deciding the right amount of stock that is required by the inventory.
In order to save time and avoid re-entering data into separate programs, ERP integration with inventory management systems can be a fruitful decision in managing various business operations.
The types of Inventory Management Software are as follows:
The name itself defines that these systems are managed manually. The complicated calculations are done by the formulas entered by the users. This type of inventory management system is best suited for startups or for businesses that have small-scale operations and enterprises which still have stock management on paper.
The tracking and ordering of the restricted number of goods can be done easily by using these systems. Therefore with this type of system, there are many chances of errors and inaccuracies in management due to the manual calculations.
By using these systems business enterprises can easily track, and manage hundreds of items and can also easily fetch data from the point of sale software. Barcode scanning systems are robust and efficient in terms of performance.
As soon as the stock is received at the warehouse, the data gets updated automatically and the managers have access to the updated data. Therefore the tracking of stock movement or inventory from one warehouse to another and from a warehouse to a customer is made simple with barcode technology.
This is one of the emerging technologies which has changed business operations altogether. The term RFID stands for advanced radio frequency identification and this system is designed specifically for businesses that have thousands of products moving in and out every day.
For all retail businesses and manufacturing businesses obtaining efficient and robust Inventory Management Software is really important and thus its design is the most crucial part.
Developing reliable and robust custom software which is capable of controlling and managing the inventory, and ensuring that there is no loss of goods due to theft or spoilage is really a challenging task. Therefore the factors that can be taken care of while developing software like this are:
Selecting a suitable Inventory Management software is indeed cumbersome work. Here are the key criteria you must consider while choosing the best inventory management system for your business:
It plays a crucial role in the success of any organization, if you are spending too much time organizing your inventory, then it will play a spoilsport. You must move towards automated systems from conventional inventory trackers. It will help you prevent overselling, mitigate inventory errors, and spend less time on manual operations tasks.
You must create a list of important features you want in the inventory management system. You must select software that can leverage emerging technologies to improve your inventory workflow and other business processes. It is always recommended to opt for a solution that can offer you additional functionalities.
3rd-party integration plays an important role in the popularity of inventory management software. You must list down the important integrations such as shipping, payment gateway, POS, 3PL, e-commerce platform, etc. Your solution must integrate directly with other tools, else you must use APIs for the same purpose.
It is important to have software that could be used by experienced and novice resources alike. It should be easy to learn and its UI/UX must be simple to traverse. Usability plays an important role and it must not be neglected at any cost.
An inventory management solution is a critical component of a business. Hence, it is important to select software that is driven by innovation and built using modern technology architecture. The software must be upgraded frequently and bugs and other errors must be fixed regularly.
Purchasing an inventory system alone is not enough, as you may encounter various technical issues in the future. To address such potential issues, you must select a software vendor, which offers constant maintenance and technical support. You must determine if you are getting phone, chat support, or just email support. Apart from that, it is important to know the quality and ratings of the support offered.
The cost of inventory management software development completely relies on various features and functionalities that are integrated into it. Therefore it is very important to possess a basic knowledge of the business requirement.
If you possess the basic knowledge of the business requirement then, in that case, you can conclude easily whether you can earn profit from just a basic introductory system or would require a complete functional inventory management system integrated with the ERP software. Also, this knowledge will assist you in setting up a realistic budget.
If you are willing to develop inventory management software from the beginning the cost may fall around $15000 – $30,000. This cost is completely dependent upon the different features, technology, and functionalities that would be integrated into the software.
The cost of developing Inventory Management Software differs from the geographical location also. In America, the development cost ranges from $200/hr whereas in India the development cost is $25 – $45/hr. Moreover, the development cost may differ depending on the developer’s experience too.
Hence if you are searching for a technology partner for developing software like Inventory Management then Arka Softwares is the right choice for you. You can easily hire our experienced developers who can assist you well in developing software like Inventory Management.
Although, the cost to develop an inventory system depends on the features, functionality, platform, and development process used. Still, it may cost you around $30,000 to build an inventory management system with basic functionality. The cost may reach $50,000 if you need advanced features and capabilities.
Currently, we have the following inventory management system across various categories.
1. Best Overall: Cin7 Orderhive
2. B2B Companies: Inflow
3. Retail Stores: Lightspeed Retail
4. Free Option: Zoho Inventory
5. Manufacturing: Megaventory
Inventory management system plays a pivotal role in Supply Chain management. It helps with tracking inventory from product manufacturers to warehouses and then to the Retailers. The inventory management system fulfills the objective of having the right product at the right place at the right time
It is a standard set of guidelines that create a framework for an organization so that it can take well-informed decisions while investing in inventories. An Inventory management policy depends on the perception of your supply chain’s abilities to meet customer requirements.
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