Improved Inventory Accuracy Increases Furniture Retailer's Labor Efficiency By 25%

Issue / Situation:

OFS works with a large office furniture retailer, Office First Solutions, that managed its own inventory and warehousing prior to working with OFS.  During inventory intake, especially with pre-owned inventory, they were unable to create identification markings for the inventory, as they only had descriptions. All the inventory details were handwritten on a receiving sheet.

As they sold inventory items, they did not consistently adjust the sheets, since they were analog and not digital. This manual process resulted in lost or inaccurate quantity, items, and location of the product. The poor data caused delays with their sales staff in regards to selling item(s) they no longer had or item(s) they had but could not find. Their sales staff spent countless hours of searching for product and trying to get an idea of what furniture inventory was available.

Because of these issues, the company lost approximately 24.85% of labor per month from their sales staff, as the staff researched inventory issues. The 24.85% loss was a huge number because they wanted their sales staff to sell products and not to waste time researching inventory.  This lost time, translated to 24.85% lost sales revenue.

The Solution:

The OFS (Order Fulfillment Solutions) team analyzed the situation and provided the company with a digital inventory management system, a turnkey approach to receiving, product identification, and put-a-way our inventory in specific rack locations. OFS also provided a systematic way of intaking pre-owned inventory.

The result? The furniture client gained back the 24.85% of their sales team’s time to allocate e to actually selling products. This improvement has driven their sales on track to achieve daily, monthly, and yearly sales goals they previously were missing.