Inventory is everything to a business like yours.
Too much and you’re drowning in product you can’t move, too little and your customers are going to the competition to meet their needs. You’ve been keeping manual records for a while, but your product line has grown so much that it’s becoming hard to tell when an item needs to be reordered.
What’s a business owner to do?
Check Out Inventory Management Software
There are lots of great inventory management software packages out there that include shopping cart integration, making it easy to stay up to the minute with your inventory levels at any time of the day or night. This goes for companies that have their own warehouses, as well as those paying a 3rd party logistics company for warehousing and distribution.
The benefits of inventory management software are enormous, here are just a few things it can do for you:
- Improve your ROI. There’s no question that having an up to the minute inventory can improve your ROI exponentially. When you know what’s selling and what’s not, it’s much easier to cross-reference those items that simply aren’t moving to find similarities between them and either correct the issue or discontinue similar products. With the help of historical data, you’ll always have just the right amount of inventory in your warehouse, too!
- Increase supply chain visibility. These days it’s just as easy to integrate with your suppliers as it is with your 3rd party logistics company. When you use your inventory management system to connect to your vendors, they can see when you have a need for more of their products and send them automatically. Automation like this can save you time otherwise spent manually ordering items that are running low or that you predict may be very popular during high volume sales seasons.
- Streamline your fulfillment. Inventory management software can do some other cool stuff, like figuring out exactly what products are most likely to be sold together. When this happens often enough, it can help save steps, and labor dollars to move those bins or pallets next to one another or bundle the items into kits. Inventory management software can give you lots of new insights into how your products are purchased.
Inventory management software is a must-have for any warehousing and distribution operation with more than a few different SKUs. There’s so much you can do with it that you’ll quickly find that your investment has more than paid for itself in streamlining processes, preventing inventory loss and even keeping your products in stock.
