Inventory Management Of The Consumer Electronics Retailing In Zimbabwe,An Electrosales Case

As supply chains become more geographically intricate due to regionalism and globalization forces,their success depends more and more on the expertise of competent logistics and supply chain management.That is,warehouse inventory management is a common problem,so is long transport time and uncertainty in arrival time.The research looks at Electrosales company in the electronics industry to carry out a series of studies on management of their warehouse in Zimbabwe from 2014 to 2018.This paper investigates consumer electronics inventory problems faced,which when grouped gives two major issues namely,outsourcing best sellers and old product stocking.A closer look into the stated issues gives rise to four issues which are,inaccurate demand forecast,unreasonable inventory classification,unscientific ordering strategy and poor inventory methods.Chapter three introduces methods to be used to curb stocking of old products namely inventory method,demand forecasting methodology of:simple moving average,exponential smoothing and weighted moving average Furthermore,it introduces the methods of:safety stock(q,r and t,s)inventory policies and ABC classification.In the fourth chapter,inventory optimization solution for sampled electronics data was proposed.For ABC classification,sorting combined with Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP)is proposed.On this basis,the corresponding inventory management strategies are developed for different types of inventory where AHP using a multi criterion inventory classification(MCIC)method is used for weighting the products.In light of the classification index,stochastic modelling tools(q,r and t,s)were then employed to calculate the re order point from the classified consumer electronics.According to the inventory of class A,the purchasing strategy of fixed order is established.On the other hand,for class B and C inventory the strategy of regular ordering is established.Demand forecasting follows after inventory optimization verification from class A and B respectively,where a comparison was drawn on the prediction results to determine the method with the least mean absolute percentage error.Chapter five puts forward conclusions on improvement suggestions for inventory management of consumer electronics taking into account some of the effects of short product life cycle,including establishing information management platform to realize future demand information(FDI).The inventory problem solving measures proposed in this paper not only have strong practical significance for the sampled company,but can be generalized to have reference value for domestic enterprises in the consumer electronics industry of Zimbabwe.