Small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have a good inventory management system in place can quickly find that their costs of goods are rising out of control. When a company first starts out, they might think it’s fine to just handle their inventory by hand, but even a small supply of products can turn up losses that are hard to track down if you’re not using technology to help manage your raw materials and goods.
And by “technology’ we mean more than an excel spreadsheet that’s manually entered. With today’s cloud technologies and tracking capabilities, it’s easier than ever to reduce waste and ensure your inventory is reordered before your warehouse shelfs are empty.
46% of SMBs use manual methods to track inventory or don’t track it at all.
Electronic inventory management tools take advantage of the trend of more business workloads being offloaded to mobile devices. With scanning capabilities and real-time tracking, these systems allow you to account for every item in your warehouse at any time from anywhere.
By more effectively managing your inventory you can:
- Reduce out-of-stock problems
- Keep funds from being tied up in excess inventory
- Reduce costly errors (such as wrong orders)
- Lower costs due to inventory loss
- More easily keep on top of vendors and price increases
Instituting a digital inventory tracking and maintenance strategy may be easier than you think. Many inventory management solutions are designed to be scalable, flexible, fast, and economical to implement.
Advantages of Electronic Inventory Management Systems
Did you know that 1/3 of businesses miss shipment deadlines because they’ve sold an item that wasn’t actually in stock? That’s just one costly type of error that digitizing your inventory can help avoid.
Here are some of the key advantages of tracking and maintaining your inventory with the help of one of these applications.
Better Management of Stock Levels
When it comes to your stock, both having too much and too little can be costly for your company. Too much stock, and you could have perishables getting old before they’re sold. Too little, and you could lose sales by not being able to turn around a shipment fast enough.
When you use barcode and scanning technology that communicates real-time updates of all your stock and gives you data on stocking trends as they connect to sales volume, you can find that “just right” stock level that keeps your customers happy, but doesn’t tie up your capital in more inventory than you need.
Reduce Manual Data Entry Tasks & Improve Speed
If you’re handling purchase orders and inventory management by hand, that’s a lot of time spent on manual entry tasks that you could be automating. Electronic management systems are designed to integrate with other office systems, like accounting software or CRM programs.
Imagine you have a salesperson out in the field and a customer says they need 50 of your “widgets” but only if they can be delivered by tomorrow morning. Instead of wasting valuable time going back to the office, then checking with the warehouse to see if the product is in stock, they can simply look up the stock levels on their mobile device and confirm the widgets are available. They can then electronically send the order in so it can be put together immediately and shipped out same day, all in just a few minutes.
Lower Lost Inventory Costs
It’s not uncommon for a CEO to look at his balance sheet wondering why cost of goods seem so high. If you aren’t tracking your inventory digitally, then it could take days to figure out what’s happened to your costs.
Barcode tracking helps you reduce lost inventory by accounting for every single item. GPS locators on more expensive items can also help you track down lost goods, which may have accidentally been put in the wrong area of the warehouse.
Gain Better Data Insights
Is one type of product being returned due to damage more than others? Would you like to break out your products into more detailed classifications so you can gain better insights about where to focus your sales team?
Having the data to make smart decisions is what sets many companies apart from others and helps them gain a competitive edge. Electronic inventory management can give you the data analytics you need to better understand customer buying patterns and capitalize on them.
Easier Supplier Management
Do you have one packaging supplier that used to be the cheapest, but now their prices are higher than the one you replaced? Keeping up to date with your suppliers is important and not always easy if you’re trying to do it manually.
Digital inventory applications make it easy to review supplier pricing, volume discount levels, and delivery timeframes, so you can make sure your costs aren’t creeping up on you.
You can also better manage different supplier locations and contacts, with everything in one place and the ability to be updated from anywhere.
Need Help Choosing the Right Inventory Management Application?
Our experts at Genuine Technology Group can help you sort through the different inventory management options to find the one tool that perfectly fits your business needs. We’ll save you time and money!
Contact us today to set up a consultation at 971-288-0880 or through our website.