Whenever you own a company and are needing to assemble, send out, and ship your product to various customers, then you might find that it is easy to get overwhelmed. Not only overwhelmed by the sales you need to make, but it is also very easy to get overwhelmed by keeping track of your inventory. You might make fifty sales and then look at your inventory and see you only have forty items available.
In order to prevent inventory mismanagement from ruining your life, you need to focus on inventory management. Inventory management focuses on helping your company figure out what they need to order, how much of it needs to be ordered, and when they need to order it in order to keep everything on top for your business.
If you want your company to have a perfectly managed inventory, then you need to follow these inventory management tips.
- Make Sure Your Warhouse Is Organized
How can you expect your staff to find anything in your warehouses if everything is disorganized and what you need is shoved in the back? The first thing you need to do is ensure that your warehouse is organized and all of your existing inventory is well put together. Making sure that you and your warehouse staff have a system to manage your inventory is going to be the bedrock of your inventory management.
If you’ve got a very disorganized warehouse, then you need to make sure that you make a plan for your warehouse organization and then stick to it.
- Don’t Be Afraid To Count
While so much of inventory management is virtual, as is most of our world, you shouldn’t be afraid to walk down to the warehouse and just start counting. It can be the best way to get a solid headcount of what you have, and it can be good to see what is in stock and what isn’t with your own eyes. You don’t have to do this every time, but it can be good to have a full and 100% accurate count of your backlog and what is inside your warehouse.
- Make Sure Your System Is Real Time
Especially for your business, you need to have a system that goes in real time. It isn’t going to be helpful for your business if your system lags behind what is happening in the front end of your business. Then you are waiting for the system to catch up and this can cause a lot of problems for your business and your sales.
If you catch your inventory management system starting to slow down and not accurately reflecting what is happening inside of your business, then you need to revamp it right away.
- Ensure You Organize Based On Condition
It is important to use sturdy and robust ladders for difficult-to-reach areas in order to easily organize your inventory into layers. While this won’t happen for every single business, for some businesses some stocks in the inventory are going to be perishable. In that case, you need to ensure those sell before they perish due to time. Make sure that you are pushing these projects and ensuring that they sell, and even if you don’t have perishable goods in your inventory, you can still organize your inventory in ‘tiers.’
Figure out what needs to be sold quickly and what can sit on the shelves awhile, and then you can change your marketing to reflect those needs. The more organization you can do for your business, the more you will find that your inventory is going to be very easy to manage.
- Look For Patterns
Finally, don’t be afraid to look for patterns. Your business will ebb and flow based on the seasons and what your customers want, so you might have three months where everything is selling like hotcakes, and then that is followed by three months of nothing being sold at all. Now you can organize your inventory around all of that, and know that you need to stock more than normal during the first three months, and less during the last three months.
This will help you keep your profits high, and your costs low, especially if you are using a vendor managed inventory system for your inventory management.
Make Sure To Make Inventory Management A Priority
Inventory management is something that will help your business, even if you don’t view it as important as selling or marketing. If you have a good backend system that is managing your warehouse stock, ,then you