Fabrikator

Fabrikator is a supply planning app that helps you understand your stock on hand, how your inventory is selling, and helps ensure that you've got a good pulse on your inventory and know what and when to re-order from your suppliers.

I particularly love their starting dashboard that gives key insights on what products are performing abnormally (whether better or worse than average), how much inventory you have on hand, and how much inventory is at-risk of running out.

You can easily track which products are going out of stock within the next 30 days, and how much the recommended re-order amount is.

As supplies start to run low, Fabrikator makes it easy to create new purchase orders, with optimal inventory supply levels, send up "the chain" for approval, and send off to your suppliers to order new inventory.

Fabrikator is much "slimmer" from a software standpoint than a full-fledged inventory management solution, yet they get you everything you need. The difference is in their simplicity.

When you are looking for an easy way to manage inventory and logistics that keeps you from losing your mind compiling manual reports/spreadsheets and calendaring reminders, this is a great option.

Keep in mind, this is not an inventory management solution. Shopify is the source of truth of the data, meaning you need accurate inventory data in Shopify to get the most out of Fabrikator.

Fabrikator can improve revenue by helping you avoid being out of stock with your top selling products. They increase your cash-on-hand by suggesting the proper re-order amounts by product, based on how they are selling and lead times, etc.

Fabrikator is for your merchandisers - your COO, head of operations, head of eCommerce, or head of merchandising. Whoever is in charge of the inventory. This person will need to set up inventory levels in Shopify, sometimes through coordinating with their 3PL or warehouse, which shouldn't take too long. And they will be in the tool at least once a week if not daily to keep track of purchase orders and inventory levels and ensure the business is maximizing its inventory catalog and cash on hand.

Fabrikator is for medium to high-volume, Direct to Consumer merchants that are sourcing multiple products (typically from multiple suppliers) and need to manage inventory and logistics for their eCommerce (Shopify) store.

When you're spending half of your week scrambling across Shopify to download spreadsheets, manually compile reports, make purchase orders by hand or in Excel or Word, and then lose complete track of your inventory supply and wondering where your products are, this tool will help you streamline all of that.

After about 50 SKUs, and especially when you have longer lead times, say over 2 weeks or over 1 month lead time on the supply chain, you really start to need a solution for managing inventory in this way.

They work really well for fashion and apparel with bloated sizes and color SKU counts.

If you have a low SKU count, you may not need this tool. If you have low volume, you may be able to manage inventory without a tool right now. If you don't hold your inventory yourself, or use a 3PL or warehouse, then you don't need a solution like this (i.e. if you're a drop-shipper or print-on-demand, this isn't for you).

This doesn't work well for subscription businesses, since the inventory is relatively straightforward.

This isn't for managing inventory across multiple marketplaces, stores, retail locations, warehouses, etc.