It’s vital to evaluate your business on a regular basis to ensure that you’re on the proper track. As a manufacturer or distributor, you realize that inventory is at the heart of your business. In the post of Covid-19, having an inventory management strategy in place to assist guide your organization through this epidemic is more vital than ever.
Inventory management process
Inventory management is the process of managing and regulating your brand’s inventory from the time it is produced until it reaches customers. Inventory management tries to guarantee that the proper amount of goods is available at the right time in the right place. Purchasing, storing, transferring, processing, and selling goods are all part of this process.
To minimize shortages or overstock, businesses must constantly monitor stock levels and estimate demand based on factors such as seasonal demand, historical trends, and marketing initiatives.
The most significant aspect of managing inventory is that it necessitates a concentrated effort on inventory tracking. It’s time to remove the option of taking inventory manually and invest in an inventory management solution. This sort of inventory management software may be incorporated with your POS system to give a continuous inventory count.
Whether you’re looking to enhance sales or just stagger SKUs to keep the business operating smoothly, here are some key strategies for managing inventory efficiently amid a manufacturing halt.
Keep on planning
Businesses that grasp inventory management rapidly discover that they have more resources for development and expansion. They also have more satisfied consumers and workers. Using cutting-edge technology and methods is critical to attaining lean inventory management. Lean inventory management allows your organization to develop more quickly.
Businesses can better plan how much inventory to purchase or create, as well as where to deploy that inventory among locations if they have precise forecasting of client demand and revenues.
So perfecting inventory management and monitoring is a never-ending endeavor. You must track outcomes on a regular basis, check stock levels, and examine any concerns that develop. You may then alter your management strategies based on this information.
It is critical to constantly fine-tune things like safety stock levels and restocking cycle durations. It’s also critical to keep an eye on global events, supply chain news, and changing customer behavior in order to adapt your strategies as needed.
Set your product priorities
Not every product is equally important. Bestsellers and impending seasonal top selections are two examples of products that matter more than others. According to the rule of thumb, 20% of all things produce 80% of customer demand. Because they are your top priority, keep an eye on their in-stock status.
For example, because you make more money each transaction, prioritize your best-selling goods for your physical store first. Save any stale or slow-moving merchandise for your web channels. So the retailer’s next priority should be to stock these goods.
Slow-moving products remain on the shelf for a long time. Because such things take up a lot of room, the supply of fast-moving objects typically falls short of demand. Large corporations employ costly software tools to calculate how much money the merchant is losing owing to these slow-moving items. Small enterprises, on the other hand, must direct suppliers to deliver items that have just been manufactured.
Update to right and savings solutions
Your key task at this point is to ensure that you continue to get items. As a result, while you may be accustomed to getting the things you want solely on price, you should be looking for other providers to assist mitigate risks in the event that your primary supplier experiences a difficulty.
It is critical to select an inventory software solution that can grow and adapt to your company. Choose one that connects with the rest of your eCommerce stack and monitors the data you need to make sound inventory planning choices.
It’s important to remember that your tools are only as good as the quality management you’ve set in place. It’s also a smart idea to use technology to reduce time in the warehouse as well as on the road, allowing employees to track things faster and with fewer mistakes.
Maintain accurate stock receipts
Incorrect stock receipts have a direct impact on your counts, which ripples across all inventory management duties. Receiving mistakes eventually leads to unexpected stock outages or unrecorded overstock, wrong reorders, and paying for products you didn’t purchase, all of which reduce your revenues.
In your inventory system, you should update the stock counts. If you utilize a point-of-sale system, you just get the purchase order, and it updates your stock counts automatically. You’ll have to manually modify counts if you’re using paper records or spreadsheets.
You can establish a stock receipt once you’ve double-checked your purchase orders versus what your supplier really supplied. A stock receipt is a record of all the items you received from your supplier. The most important factor is that your receiving numbers are correct.
Establish returns handling procedures
It’s critical to get unsold merchandise off your shelves and off your books as soon as feasible. Unsellable returns, faulty or damaged product shipments, in-store damages, and unwanted stock such as seasonal goods can all be returned to the supplier in this manner. As a result, you must deal with these commodities on a regular basis by modifying counts and values, noting causes, and disposing of them as needed.
It’s time to resolve pullbacks as soon as possible. Pullbacks are things that are taken from the sales floor and returned to suppliers for reimbursements, such as seasonal goods or unsold items with return terms. Pull, record, and return pullbacks in a timely way per supplier instructions to earn credit and free your sales floor for lucrative items.
Improve omnichannel technology
Customers have been compelled to try new purchasing choices as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, and the retail environment has definitely changed forever. Investing in omnichannel technology gave merchants actual choices for delivering agility and flexibility throughout the epidemic.
Companies must continue to offer these actual possibilities, leverage technology to promote virtual inventory spaces, utilize their asset bases in a channel-agnostic manner, and deploy flexible last-mile delivery modes to manage retail recovery following.
Bottom Line
The importance of managing inventory for retailers and online retail businesses cannot be overstated. And as businesses expand beyond modest warehouses and into larger spaces, so does the necessity to manage inventory properly.
As a result, in the post epidemic, the demand for better inventory management has surfaced. The suggestions in this article can assist shops in meeting that need.