Being assigned to inventory is one of the most feared tasks by management teams. Inventory is associated with long aisles of shelving, dusty boxes, counting and noting labels non-stop. Who wants to be the archivist pushing carts in a dark warehouse from an Indiana Jones movie?
The right Choices
Technological advances in inventory management systems have made this work much easier, more agile and participatory, and inventory control also affects marketing and sales tasks. Make a visit to https://www.action1.com/p/Free-Software-Inventory-sw.html for the right option now.
- Inventory management consists of keeping track of all the products stored by a seller or distributor, including characteristics of each one, location, dimensions, weight and units in stock. Maintaining order goes hand in hand with optimizing warehousing costs and orders for production or stock materials.
- A good inventory management strategy is essential to ensure the operation of a business, avoid unnecessary losses of money and boost profits through sales and user information provided by the commercial and marketing teams.
Follow these five tips to achieve the most efficient inventory control system possible.
How to achieve efficient inventory control
Keep product information up to date
No inventory management and warehousing system can function well without accurate, up-to-date product information in real time.
This is essential to have each product located, to know the exact amount of available stock that can be sold in each channel, and to speed up the order preparation process. In addition, it reduces the chances of sending the wrong products to buyers.
The basic data to identify products in an inventory includes the SKU, barcode, CPU, manufacturer, lot number, variation (type of model, color, size, size), and even the cost to be able to calculate the total value of the stored products and balance between the cost of stocks and profits.
For this purpose, nothing better than Product Information Management software
This tool keeps the product information of simple and complex catalogs up to date and without errors, and allows you to connect to inventory management programs to share information on stocks, buyers, orders, etc.
Small businesses can start with manual control. As the catalog and order volume grow, a more sophisticated and automated inventory control system is required.
Data centralization allows all teams involved to access exactly the same information, including the customer service team , which can resolve buyer inquiries about available stock.
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Prioritize stock
Not all products in a warehouse should be treated the same. Your stock priority depends on the sales data. This determines three fundamental strategies:
The “even levels”: The minimum stock necessary for each product and that must always be available in the warehouse. They serve as useful alerts, since as soon as the stock level falls below the minimum marked, an automatic order can be made to avoid situations of out-of-stock products.
The “First in, first out” rule: It means that in a product type the stock that was acquired first must always be sold first. This avoids accumulation of products that can expire or spoil.
80/20 Ratio: It is often said that 80% of the benefits of a catalog come from 20% of the products. This does not mean that the remaining 80% should be eliminated, but rather that it is necessary to prioritize stock and vigilance on the products, according to their importance and rate of sales. Take into account factors such as seasonality, days of highest sales, cost, volume of demand per order, etc.