Preferred Retail Systems

The setup of your inventory items in RMS will serve as the foundation of Data upon which your enterprise operates. It is the Holy Grail of RMS and the basis of all inventory management tools. Carefully designing your inventory scheme is the single most important aspect of a successful RMS deployment.

Here is what we have learned:

A properly designed inventory scheme will allow you to use a barcode scanner to do many day to day tasks very efficiently. Anything that can be scanned should be scanned for improved accuracy and efficiency. You will come to rely heavily on your scanner.

But there are those tasks that will require you to manually find inventory items, and reports about your inventory items will make much more sense if you follow an inventory convention throughout the enterprise. Remember to keep the entire description under 40 characters, as this is the width of your Receipt Printer and will look better to your customers.

The convention we have found most useful (including field length) is as follows:

Description (<25) / size(3) / color(2) / attribute(2or4)

This would appear as the following description:

Z-Walker M10 BR RO

This is a description of a: Z-Walker Mens Size 10 Brown with Rough Outsole. Look for a list of abbreviations elsewhere on this site.

By following this convention you will have much better results in viewing your inventory as it will sort alphanumerically either ascending or descending. (You can sort by clicking on the header bar above the item description.)  Thus your items will sort by description, then by size, then color, and finally by attribute.

OK that was simple enough! Now let’s explore non Z-Coil items. For any non Z-Coil Item use the company name or an established sequence of letters for every item from that company. This will keep all of your various companies items grouped together for easy viewing. By doing this, it will similarly look like the above example:

Spenco LG GN Gel

Pay attention to the spelling within company lines and ensure that all items start with the same spelling. Furthermore, be sure to use the same numbering system in all cases. We suggest using a three digit alphanumeric such as M10 for Men’s size 10. Or W07 for Women’s size 7. In the case where no numeric size is given, then use SM or MD or LG, or something similar that makes sense to you, just as long as you use it consistently throughout the system.

Now for the important part! Matrixes

A Matrix is to RMS what a spreadsheet is to an Engineer or what a 10-key is to an accountant. A fundamental tool so basic, yet essential in the automation of inventory management that once understood you will simply not be willing to do without them. Standing aside from all of the other features, it is enough alone to justify using RMS over any other POS/Accounting product – period!

A Matrix is like a virtual item in your inventory list that represents a group of items but is not a physical item. It holds the properties of all the sub items held within much like an excel spreadsheet. The only thing you need to do to maintain it is to add or remove items as the need may arise.

Through the use of Matrixes you can price change or perform other essential inventory tasks on a group of items at the same time rather than on individual items one at a time. In other words, instead of opening an item and changing its properties, I can designate a group of items (defined in the matrix) such as all Freedom 2000 shoes, and with a few mouse click, change one of a dozen or so attributes of all Freedom 2000 shoes in my inventory.

Let’s assume you have 1,000 items in your inventory list and you decide to decrease your prices by 15% on 250 Z-Coil items during a special sale that lasts three days. Can you imagine opening each item and changing the price and then changing it back three days later? With a Matrix, you could accomplish that task in about 10 seconds by opening the matrix, filtering the shoes you want, changing the price on one item and then pasting that change to all of the items in the matrix.

A recent store owner simply stared in disbelief and could only say “WOW” when she observed this the first time. This one feature alone will save hours each week doing inventory management that was previously done by hand, or in some cases not done at all.

FYI, QuickBooks tracks about 5 attributes in your inventory. RMS tracks nearly 10 times that many. Just another quick insight about the difference in the two products inventory management capabilities.

In summary, set up your inventory right the first time. Keep it accurate, up to date, and use the exact same naming conventions throughout. Doing so will make life much easier for you and all of your sales associates.