Many entrepreneurs, small business owners, and founders, can live in a commerce world where smaller businesses start to compete against larger and more global corporations. So knowing how to do things in an effective way, can help to grow your business, grow your brand, and help with scalability, and seeing how things run. You will find some inventory control basics handsome best practices, so that you can advance the automation of it all, helping your business in many ways.
Importance of inventory management
For many businesses that are goods-based, the value of your inventory is something that can’t be overstated. So it shows why inventory management is something that is really important to think about as the benefits really are tangible. It can help your business to operate more efficiently, and can also help the longevity of the business. Without having a smart approach to things, then you can be faced with several different challenges, from large costs, loss of profits, and things like bad customer service. Better inventory management will help you in the following ways:
- It will help to reduce costs
- It can help you to better optimize order fulfillment. You don’t want to say things are in stock when in actual fact they aren’t
- You can provide better customer service as you’ll be able to see what has happened with orders, or as mentioned above, can see what is or isn’t in stock anymore
- You can also prevent losing money through theft, returns, and even spoilage
Inventory management can also help to provide some insights into how things are going financially. You can identify behaviors of your customers and their preferences as well. You can better assess future product or business opportunities, and different trends in the future.
One of the most straightforward things that you can do is to make sure that your stock is clear and laid out in a straightforward way. It could be as simple as getting something some shelving units from somewhere like Whittle Shelving. It is a simple thing, but then you can easily see what is where, and you can go from there. You have to start somewhere, and manually doing it can be a good idea if you don’t have anything else in place.
Stock keeping units, or something that can be known as SKUs, is all about product codes that you will use and then you can look them up to find and identify stock that you have from different lists, orders, and invoices. If you are looking to set up a system that is easy to understand, then it is one of the main things that you’ll look to identify different products. You will be better able to manage and identify your stock availability, as well as things like where the products are, and what is where. You can better identify things like how fast things are selling, your profits, and any lack in those kinds of things, and so on. Things like shrinkage and loss are a great thing to monitor as well.
