Still managing your inventory on a spreadsheet or worse, not managing it at all? If so, then your business could be suffering in a variety of ways. In this post, we're going to look at the benefits of inventory management and how it can help both your employees and your customers.
1. It increases efficiency.
Employee efficiency can greatly increase the overall health of your business. Without organized inventory management, you are paying your employees to dig through files, email spreadsheets back and forth, run out to the warehouse each time there is a question about what's in stock, or manually write reports on a daily basis. Instead of paying them for these tasks, you could easily eliminate them by implementing a good inventory management system. Your employees will be happy that they focus on more valuable tasks, and you will be happy because everything you need to know about your business will be easily accessible.2. You'll always know where your inventory is.
Businesses with multiple locations suffer when their employees have to keep calling each other to find that one piece of inventory, or to confirm that it is actually there. Accurate inventory management will eliminate any issues with inventory location, including being unable to track down that one item a customer wants. Speaking of...3. You'll be able to close every sale possible.
Inaccurate inventory management can lead to lost sales. There are plenty of ways things can go wrong, such as an employee telling a customer an item is out of stock, only to discover it is in stock later, or vice versa. Or worse, a customer is told to go to a different store that has the item when they don't. If you're confident in your inventory management system, these types of lapses will become few and far between, and only because of human entry error.4. You'll always hit your delivery dates.
While you might make the sale at the beginning of the day, you may end up with a reputation for poor customer service if you start making lots of late deliveries due to not actually having an item in stock. You also don't want to make the customer wait for you to receive a shipment from the vendor simply because you didn't know when the vendor shipped fresh inventory to your location. With accurate inventory management, you'll be able to track your inventory precisely, even if it's en route to your warehouse.5. You can change vendor order frequency when needed.
The flip side of not having enough inventory is having too much. Storage can be expensive for some businesses, and the last thing you want to have to do is put on a big sale just because you over-ordered a specific item. Keeping track of exactly how much you have of everything along with how much you have on order can allow you to change your order frequency with the vendor in a timely manner so that you don't have too much of a good thing.6. You'll be able to re-order with ease.
Speaking of ordering from the vendor, if you're still using a manual system, you're likely recreating purchase orders from Word docs. While that system works, it does lead to more potential errors including entering the wrong item number, describing item specs incorrectly, or miscalculating currency exchanges. Proper inventory management would allow you to copy recent purchase orders and select specific item number numbers and specs from a dropdown so order errors can become a problem of the past.Getting started.
Unleashed is a software solution that will provide you with all of these benefits, and because it is cloud-based, users can access their data from anywhere they have an internet connection. Sign up here for a free 14-day trial, and see the difference that accurate and efficient inventory management software can make for your business.