Setting up an Inventory Management System

Setting up an Inventory Management System

If your business is growing but you don’t have stock visibility, or you’re running out of stock, then you probably have an inventory related issue. Having an Inventory Management System allows you to manage all your stock from a central place and will help you make better business decisions.

Businesses that experience growth, but don’t have sufficient Inventory Management processes in place often suffer from:

• Unproductive operations
• Thief
• Poor Customer Satisfaction
• Missing data
• A incoherent customer experience
• Ill-advised business decisions caused by a lack of data
• Stock issues (Oversupply or Undersupply caused by incorrect forecasting)

Things to consider before selecting an Inventory Management system

• Understanding your sale and supply workflow is crucial. Look where you need stock visibility and recognize what processes currently connect to each other, and who is involved. Making time to work on your inventory management system is important, despite what people say, your inventory management system will need time. Resources are needed to work on the system just like any other system implementation.

• Keep product data together. Vendors should be looking to supply guidance on the best practices to import data. It is crucial that you understand where all your stock and cost data is, inventory management makes sure you have easy access to this.

• Look to get as much information as possible on your products. During some stage, you’re going to need to input costs in your selected system. Preparing as soon as possible, by getting all your costing data together.

• Like any other process, training is required, having the right people and training methods in place is one of the most crucial things to consider. Your inventory system can be the best in the world, but if you don’t have the processes and training systems to support it, the system won’t produce the results you desire. This is mostly important for organizations functioning both P.O.S (point of sale) and inventory systems because not all P.O.S staff are as trained as managers.

• Make sure that scheduled stock stakes are performed and have a set around this.