Your best-selling SKU is out of stock again and three customers emailed this morning asking when you'll restock. You're losing revenue with every hour that ticks by. Worse, your warehouse is currently packed with slow-moving inventory that's tying up working capital.
It may seem like a slow-moving disaster with no discernable cause. Thankfully, you CAN do something about this. The source of your problem is that your connected systems weren't designed to talk to each other:
Shopify tracks sales, but doesn't know about your warehouse stock
QuickBooks handles financials but has no clue what's selling on Amazon
Your spreadsheet-based reorder system is 48 hours behind reality
Conventional wisdom says you need a legacy ERP system. But integrating a rigid ERP system can take up to 18 months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and forces you to leave your old workflows behind. Then you also have to deal with consultants, additional process disruptions, and risk things breaking.
However, there is a solution that won’t add financial, time, and process debt to your company: you need a systematic, architectural change that allows your connected systems to talk to each other. And the best part is, you don’t have to blow up your operation to integrate it.
Most operations leaders think inventory issues stem from poor processes or bad decisions: Buying too much leaves you with overstock. Buying too little creates stockouts which means vanishing sales. While true to a degree, that’s not the whole story.
When you're running on Shopify, QuickBooks, and spreadsheets, you're making decisions with incomplete data. Your reorder calculations rely on sales numbers from yesterday, inventory counts from last week, and supplier lead times you're manually tracking. By the time you've reconciled everything, market conditions have already shifted.
According to McKinsey & Company, companies that successfully implement AI-enabled supply-chain management have improved inventory levels by 35% — a result driven by better data architecture, not bigger software. This isn’t achieved through magic, rather it comes from architecture designed to support your business’ actual needs.
When you’ve got the right architecture for your business, you can experience:
Real-time visibility. Know exactly what's in stock, where it's located, and when you need to reorder.
Automated replenishment. Your system triggers purchase orders based on demand forecasting and safety stock calculations.
Get beyond guessing what’s going on with your inventory, and integrate the tools that help you know, instead.
Intelligent Inventory Management is what helps solve your inventory pain points — the worst of which are stockouts and overstock. Preventing these severe sales liabilities requires four interconnected capabilities working together.
Demand forecasting predicts future sales from historical data, seasonality, and trends. A more basic forecasting system uses last year's numbers (which are hard to keep accurate with the speed of the current market). Intelligent forecasting uses weighted moving averages, identifies trends, and adjusts for promotions based on your real-time data.
When demand forecasting is baked into your inventory system, reorder recommendations update automatically as sales patterns change. Instead of reacting to new demand with old data, you’re able to anticipate and meet the need without the guesswork.
Every supplier has a lead time: the gap between placing an order and receiving inventory. For domestic suppliers, that might be 7-14 days. For overseas manufacturers, it could be 60-90 days.
Lead-time awareness means tracking actual supplier performance over time and adjusting reorder triggers accordingly. If your supplier's delivery window is widening, your system should increase safety stock automatically, without you having to adjust it manually — preventing a potential stockout.
Safety stock is the extra inventory you keep on hand to cover unexpected spikes in sales or delays in replenishment.
The formula involves demand variability, lead-time variability, and your desired service level (the percentage of orders you want to fulfill without stockout). Most operations teams either ignore safety stock entirely or pick an arbitrary buffer like "keep two weeks extra."
Intelligent inventory systems calculate safety stock dynamically. When volatility increases, safety stock recommendations adjust upward. When demand stabilizes, they decrease to free up working capital.
Reorder points trigger purchase orders when inventory drops below a threshold. Automated replenishment monitors inventory across all locations in real time, subtracts committed but not-yet-fulfilled orders, adds incoming purchase orders, and calculates net available inventory.
When that number hits your reorder point, it generates a purchase order automatically, but may also flag it for approval oversight is needed.
This results in never scrambling to reorder because you forgot to check inventory. The system handles monitoring, while you monitor the exceptions.
You've probably heard the pitch: implement an ERP system with inventory management, and all your operational problems disappear. With one monolithic, unified system you get end-to-end visibility from order to cash!
The reality isn’t so rosy.
Traditional ERP implementations take anywhere from 18 to 24 months (on average) for mid-sized organizations implementing all modules, according to Gartner Peer Community research. During that time, you're paying consultants, reengineering business processes, migrating historical data, and praying nothing breaks while you try to keep up with your customers and product demands.
For small to mid-sized businesses in the $5M-$50 range, that's an existential risk. You can't afford to:
Pause operations for a year while implementing
Rip out tools that are working today
Lock into workflows that don't match how your business operates
You don't have to choose between living with stockouts and committing to an 18-month ERP implementation. There's a third option: composable ERP that’s designed to meet your business where it is right now — then scaling with its growth.
If inventory management is your biggest bottleneck, we can work with you to solve that first.
Tailor's approach eliminates implementation risk because you're validating ROI at every step. If the inventory module delivers significant reductions in your stockout rate in the first month—like many customers experience—you've proven the model works. And you’ve done it without disrupting your workflows, techstack, or frustrating your team while they serve your customers.
That's what composable ERP means: flexibility that grows with you, without vendor lock-in or rip-and-replace.
Start with a 45-minute scoping call to identify whether inventory management is truly your highest-pain area or if another module (order management, production planning) should come first.
We’ll work with you to map your current tech stack and integration requirements. Tailor's API-first architecture integrates more than 80 crucial tools, including Shopify, Amazon, QuickBooks, Xero, ShipStation, and leading 3PLs. Most companies already have the building blocks in place — they just need a unified operational backbone connecting them.
Then, we define a 4-6 week pilot focused on measurable outcomes:
Reduction in stockout rate
Improvement in inventory turns
Decrease in manual reconciliation time
During this call we set clear success criteria upfront so you know exactly what ROI looks like. If the pilot proves value, you can expand on your terms. This may look like adding:
Order management to automate multi-channel fulfillment
Purchasing to streamline procure-to-pay workflows
Production planning if you manufacture products
Every module we offer builds on the same API-first foundation, so there's no rip-and-replace as you scale.
As ERP trends shift toward modularity and composability, we believe ERP should enable growth, not constrain it. You shouldn't have to choose between all-in-one suites that are rigid and expensive or specialized tools that don't talk to each other. Composability eliminates that false trade-off.
Ready to solve stockouts without massive implementations? Book a demo to see how Tailor's Inventory Management system can integrate with your existing stack.
