Consulting
- 2 Apr, 2024
- 205 Views
- 0 Comment
Every retailer eventually says some version of “we need a unified view of inventory.” Almost nobody means the same thing by it, and that’s usually where the project runs into trouble.
For a single-format retailer, unified inventory might just mean syncing stock counts across a handful of store systems. For a business that spans retail and wholesale – different customer types, different pricing structures, sometimes different product identifiers for the exact same physical item – “unified” is a much bigger claim. It means deciding, concretely, what a single product record looks like when two systems have historically disagreed about its SKU, its price tier, and how often its stock count gets refreshed.
We ran into this directly building SchemasCC, a platform that lets shoppers order from a network of retail and wholesale stores and get items delivered from whichever location actually has them in stock. The technical challenge wasn’t the delivery logistics — it was that “in stock” had to mean the same thing across stores that had never shared a data model before. A wholesale partner might update stock counts nightly; a retail storefront might update them in real time at the till. If the platform trusted both sources equally, a customer could order something that was sold three hours earlier.
The fix wasn’t a clever algorithm. It was deciding, deliberately, what counts as the stock-of-record for each product at each location, how staleness gets flagged, and what happens when two sources disagree. That’s a governance decision before it’s an engineering one — and it’s the part most “unified inventory” projects skip, because it’s less interesting to build than the app on top of it.
If your unification project is stuck, the question worth asking isn’t “which integration tool should we use.” It’s “what’s our actual rule for which source wins when two systems disagree” — because until that’s answered, no tool will make the disagreement go away.
DROP US A LINE
Connect with Schemas Axiom
Ready to take the first step towards unlocking opportunities, realizing goals, and embracing innovation? We're here and eager to connect.
To More Inquiry
+353 87 484 7266
To Send Mail