By Nigel Hilton
If you sell physical products of any kind, it’s likely you need to keep some kind of inventory. Whether you have a small storage space or a sprawling warehouse, you need to know what’s in your inventory at all times. If you don’t, you could end up delaying orders, letting down customers and wasting money. Good inventory management is the key to ensuring you have what you need, whenever you need it. Making improvements to your inventory management could save you time and money, and increase customer satisfaction too. If you think it’s time to do that, you can use a variety of strategies.
Find the Right Inventory Software
These days, it’s easy to find software that will help you do almost any task. Inventory software helps you to keep track of the stock you currently have, and could even help with placing orders and other tasks. Many inventory software choices can link up to other software too, such as whatever you use for your accounting. You can use your software to keep track of what’s selling so you know what’s flying off the shelves and what’s not doing so well. Plus, you should be able to reduce the amount of data entry you need to do with automated tasks and bulk inputs.
Work Out Optimal Order/Production Frequency
You can’t just guess what you need to have in your inventory and when. If you do, you could end up having too much of one thing while your customers have to wait while you get another item back in stock. You need to know the best way to calculate when you should be making or ordering new products, and in what volumes. You need key information to work these things out, like sales forecasts and production lead times. Using these statistics, you can use formulas to work out when you need more stock and how long before that you should be ordering it.
Improve Picking and Sorting Equipment
Part of managing an inventory is picking the items and packaging them, ready to be sent out. This needs to be done accurately and efficiently so that the right items are picked in the right numbers. Equipment and technology can help to make this easier. You can even get specialist equipment for different industries. Pharmacy dispensing robots not only help you manage your inventory more easily, but they also make sure dispensing medications is carried out safely. They can reduce potential liability issues due to mistakes made.
Keep Doing Physical Counts
Even if you use various types of technology to manage your inventory, it’s still worth physically counting now and then. It doesn’t have to be too often, but it’s useful to do it perhaps once a year, every six months, or after major sales events or changes. When using tech to improve things, it’s always helpful to have a human check things that a computer could miss.
Stay on top of your inventory with effective management tactics. It could make a huge difference to how well you run your business.
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