Fuse Inventory
Driving Business Outcomes through Optimized Inventory

For eCommerce companies, effective inventory control is all about balancing customer satisfaction and cash flow. Efficient product planning and accurate demand forecasting is crucial to avoid both shortage and surplus of inventory stock. However, many of these eCommerce companies are manually managing their inventory orders and product categories in Excel, which denies them a holistic view of their inventory. It also leaves blind spots in understanding the shopping habits of their target audience. As a result, they either overestimate the required buying quantity, which adds to the expense and increases the risk of dead stock on hand, or end up advertising out-of-stock products, thereby negatively affecting the customer experience.

To assist eCommerce and digitally-native brands optimize their inventory management, Los Angeles, California-based Fuse Inventory offers a modern planning and forecasting platform that analyzes data to provide enhanced inventory visibility and improved governance. The platform gathers data from every layer of the supply chain, centralizes it, and runs analytics on it in realtime to enable users with streamlined inventory ordering, fluid cash flow, and scalable business.

Rachel Liaw, Co-Founder and CEO of Fuse, explains, “Most companies are simply taking the average sales from the 16-32 weeks and applying a growth multiplier. Even the latest ERP solutions in the market have archaic planning modules. Most ERP solutions that boast of predictive capabilities follow rules-based techniques rather than the latest statistical models.” Contrastingly, Fuse’s platform is built on machine learning and statistics-based approach to delivering accurate insights. The company’s platform creates a single source of truth by integrating with other systems, including eCommerce storefronts, ERP and accounting software, warehouses and 3PL systems.

Such a well-planned technology approach allows Fuse’s clients to visualize, analyze, and forecast their entire inventory in a single platform and generate sophisticated reports quickly and easily. Having detailed business health reports at hand, the clients can delve deep with performance metrics to improve the overall business outcomes.

The platform gathers data from every layer of the supply chain, centralizes it, and runs analytics on it in real-time to enable users with streamlined inventory, fluid cash flow, and scalable business.

“Our platform uses proprietary algorithms to forecast demand so you can plan your inventory efficiently and accurately,” says Liaw. The company accounts for the seasonality of business as well as the recent trends and allows the user to make changes. It also notifies about urgent restocks if a product is running low on stock. Apart from providing visibility into the supply chain, Fuse’s demand forecasting algorithm accounts for product promotions, new products and prior stockouts. “We have a new products and categories algorithm that helps us predict how the new products will perform at launch and through its lifecycle,” says Liaw.

Fuse’s health metrics provide insights into how much a client has overstocked and understocked. The company’s smart platform centralizes real-time sales and inventory data and runs its algorithm to consistently generate smart order recommendations. Thus, providing clients with insights on what to buy and how much to buy. For example, digitally-native home brand Snowe was facing challenges in forecasting their online and retail channels given their complex supply chain. By using Fuse, the client improved their forecast accuracy, procurement process, and budget allocation, which resulted in enhanced business productivity.

Fuse’s ongoing initiatives include continuously expanding multi-channel capabilities as the landscape changes. Furthermore, the company is looking to add different scenario planning features into the platform that will help clients in analyzing the proper allocation to suppliers and optimizing supply chain management.