When people refer to inventory management, they generally associate this with retail systems. Automation of inventory management with a dedicated inventory control software has become new norm in many business sectors – from manufacturing to services, education and infrastructure, education, government, and so much more. Inventory management software streamlines and organizes both inventory flow monitoring and management processes to ensure that all the necessary inventory supply is adequate at the right time and also at the superior quality. Integrating an inventory management software with a Vendor Managed Inventory will provide you with excellent production efficiency. It also benefits its customers to reduce costs associated with the purchase, stock holding and to remove a whole variety of hidden administration and transaction costs.
Inventory management – a price worth paying that business owners are fully aware of. Almost any manufacturing and warehousing business widely considered for this fact. The goal of article will be to offer additional and an in-depth understanding as to what inventory management software is, what it really is, and why the digital use of inventory management is pragmatically necessary for just about any kind of supply chain business. This will also give you a clear overview of the important features an inventory management software ought to have.
Anyone who has a production and supply business knows that inventory is one of the most crucial sources of profits. An accurate inventory assessment will have a significant effect on sales and revenue, and it could be disadvantageous for the business to make a mistake.
“Out of stock” instances are often seen as a setback, and sometimes it adversely affects your income and reputation negatively. Especially if you are a young company or even an established business, running a single retail site or a wide range of consignment outlets and distributors, inventory management software helps to track and control products and stocks and helps manage the inventory and sales.
Inventory Management: What is it?
Control over inventories is one of the aspects of operating a supply chain. Inventory control involves keeping track of products stored in a warehouse. In retail, manufacturing, distribution, appropriate inventory and warehouse handling, and all other sectors are necessary to ensure that a business will have enough supplies to meet customer demand.
In an overall sense, it means handling and consolidating with all of a company’s various activities to have informed decisions.
What is Inventory Management Software?
When the inventories are not managed accurately and efficiently, one of the two things will arise – either business will lose too much money on its product revenue or spend a lot of money storing completely unnecessary products.
An inventory management software is the one that establishes and manages the inventory process (from quotations to the fulfillment of orders). It also maintains a record of the consumer, distributor, production orders, delivery times, and other details along the way; thus, a business owner can track the progress of what products are being sold and how many.
Inventory management software will also provide detailed productivity and valuation analyses, as well as overall inventory documentation. Listed below are some of the upsides of getting an inventory management software for the business:
Benefits of Inventory Management Software
- Inventory management software helps to track and monitors all amounts of inventory and generates a useful overview of the stock levels in hand.
- Tracks the market value and standardization of performance by monitoring consumer demands correspondingly.
- Reordering is fast and easy.
- Inventory management software can already be linked to a range of many other software programs, which include financial reporting and Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP).
- Maintain transparency of stocks at any time through database-generated reports from each retail outlet or warehouse location.
- Potential market forecast by analyzing and interpreting data dynamics and stockpiling inventories.
A successful inventory management software will, therefore, not only keep track of the number of inventory levels in hand but also be reliable enough to provide measurable data analytics, for example: separating low and high-selling products and creating reorder notifications if stock supply is low.
Must-have features of an excellent Inventory Management Software
- Accurate monitoring of inventories
It is also essential that all employees in inventory management control fully understand what product lines are in stock in real-time and specific locations where they are kept in warehouses to help increase productivity, reduce the costs and expedite the process. The most crucial feature of inventory management software is the key to accurate inventory control.
An inventory management software should be able to provide the critical components for supply chain management with detailed, real-time information. This helps prevent you from having a stock loss, enabling automatic reordering as well as receiving direct feedback if you make a sale.
- Integration of Barcodes
The manual inventory and monitoring of stocks are strenuous and highly vulnerable to human error. If you conduct an inventory monitoring process manually, the business could very well run into irreparable issues.
The most straightforward technique to monitor inventories would be to use barcodes. By integrating barcode scanning into an inventory management software and purchasing readily available barcode scanners, companies would be able to utilize this innovation to optimize accuracy, efficiency, and even significantly reduce costs.
The inclusion of barcode scanning systems will indeed help immensely in Inventory management. This significantly improves inventory tracking, inventory-taking, and stock management, rendering it so much more beneficial. Businesses can conveniently serialize commodities or make asset tags, consequently significantly improving monitoring.
- Completion of quotations, purchases, deliveries, and orders
Purchasing choices taken by a business strongly impacts how accurately the number of inventories is monitored or controlled. Inventory management software guarantees that the stocks are continuously updated whenever a purchasing order is issued. The software must be easy and convenient in creating POs with all of the needed information on the database.
It also has to create POs when commodities are low in stock seamlessly, file partial orders and tracks back-orders, record the POs from start to finish, and tag Purchase Order as partially issued.
- Customer Relationship Manager or CRM
A CRM helps a business owner to help secure customer data about past transaction history and preferences for predicting possible behavior.
