Date: 06/05/2020
Why is inventory control so important to your business?
It may not seem like it, but inventory management is essential to the health of your company.
Seen as “capital goods,” the administration of this sector is often not taken seriously by managers until they begin to face problems of disappearing inventory and profits stemming from this lack of attention to this part of the business.
Inventory management is critical. Dead inventory causes your cash flow to stop and leads to increased storage expenses. At the same time, insufficient stock means you lose sales opportunities and new business development.
These are a few of the reasons that inventory management is so important. The financial health of your business depends on it.
Real time inventory management can prevent these problems and help you balance sales and stock to keep your business running smooth.
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Major Consequences of Companies That Do Not Have Inventory Management
While inventory management is critical to a company’s health, many entrepreneurs in the stone business still lack an efficient system to manage their products.
Because of this, they end up having a number of issues such as:
Dead Stock
Dead stock means no cash flow.
When you do not have an inventory management solution, the chances that this situation continues to happen become greater.
This is because you, as a team or as a manager, lack the information you need. It’s impossible to know which items are selling or being used the most, which have been held for too long, and which have seasonal or fluctuation demand.
Therefore, your company ends up losing money, making poor purchasing decisions, fulfilling contacts late, etc.
In addition, to representing lost cash flow opportunities, this dead stock can also be a warehousing and storage nightmare.
Greater Chance of Fraud
Unfortunately, all businesses are at risk of fraud. Product diversion, whether by employees, partners, or even suppliers, is more common than you might think.
Without inventory management or with a manual, easy-to-circumvent process, fraud is much easier.
After all, how will you know if something is being diverted if there is no record of where it should be or when it left?
The damage this type of diversion can cause to your business can be nothing, and it can be everything.
Easier to make mistakes
When you do not maintain efficient inventory management in your business it makes everything more susceptible to errors.
Manual inventory management is often complex and driven by reams of paper making it difficult to search quickly and to secure properly.
Poor inventory management increases the chances of buying too much of some stock items and running out of others.
And it also affects all the logistics of your business.
Ineffective Decisions
A consequence of the ease of mistakes.
When you don’t manage and track your inventory it’s hard to have the information you need to make the right decisions. Companies that don’t practice inventory control end up buying too many raw materials or letting essential products go out of stock. Lack of necessary inventory can lead to missing important dates with suppliers and cash flow issues as these missed dates turn into missed sales.
These are just some of the problems caused by this lack of management.
Looking at the financial issue, it’s clear that your business can recoup lost capital by using efficient and secure inventory management.
How to manage inventory efficiently?
To control your company’s inventory, you need to think about all the aspects that product storage entails, from physical space to the tracking and control methods used.
Here are some tips for effective inventory management in your business.
Where to stock up??
Choose a space with ideal storage conditions and easy access. Organization is key.
Inventory?
Know what is stocked and how much each product costs and is used. Knowing this, you can analyze which products have the most demand.
Constant inventory management, rather than occasional audits, is recommended for the best results.
Again, we stress the importance of having all this data cataloged, safe and well organized.
Purchase Planning?
It is very important to carefully monitor what goes in and out of stock so purchases can be planned in advance.
When planning these purchases pay attention to seasonal changes in demand, such as certain stone types or colors being popular at certain times of year.
Purchase planning is also important to know when is the best time to conduct promotions, rotate stock, and contact suppliers, vendors, and industry groups to keep your business up to date.
Business flow?
Knowing what goes in and out is only part of inventory management. You need to replace inventory only as needed and avoid waste.
Especially in times of economic downturn, it’s important to only stock what you need for immediate use. This must be balanced with the need to service customers in a timely manner so they don’t look elsewhere.
Use technology to your advantage
To be able to control all of this information, you need inventory management software that meets the needs of your business. With the help of this software, it’s easy to if your stock is running low, has been exhausted, or is in excess.
Software such as SlabWare, in addition to tracking your inventory, is a complete financial and sales management tool, streamlining many processes and integrating all available data. This means: you can get it easier in your day to day life as everything is centralized in one place.
What are the advantages of having inventory control software in your business?
New technologies have emerged to optimize the daily tasks of business owners. Slab control software is one such technology.
This kind of tool will make it easier for you to manage your business, and you will still have several benefits, such as:
Optimizing everyday tasks
One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs is managing to cope with an avalanche of difficult inventory control tasks such as arrival and departure of goods, reports, logistics, and others.
Doing all of this manually will take more time than necessary and lead to productivity losses.
From the moment you deploy inventory management software in your enterprise, you can automate and optimize these daily tasks.
This keeps your team more productive and brings better results to your company.
Task Centralization?
Another advantage of having this kind of feature is that you can centralize all tasks.
Companies that don’t utilize inventory management software end up using different platforms for these tasks, increasing the chances that errors will occur.
When everything is centralized in one place, it is easier to manage these aspects.
You won´t need to move from here to there to solve important business management tasks.
Everything can be done in the same program.
Limit Access for Each User
Remember that one of the problems caused by lack of inventory control is the risk of fraud?
Having software to manage this issue allows you to end this problem.
This is because it is possible to limit the access for each user. You can set the ability of users to use all, some, or none of the features of the software.
Each registered users can have custom permissons controlled by you.
This makes it possible to have tighter control over everyone’s actions, and in the event of fraud, it becomes easier to identify and stop the culprit.
Reports?
One of the business tools that inventory control software offers is reporting.
With this type of software, inventory use and production history information becomes much easier to access and track.
This is because the program itself collects information and organizes it for you simply and quickly, giving you all the data you need to make the best decisions.
This feature also comes in handy when performing monthly or yearly audits.
With just a few clicks, you’ll have the information you need to make comparisons between sales periods.
Easier to issue documents and labels?
SlabWare even makes it easier for you to print documents and labels or ready-to-use templates preloaded into the system. This allows you to save your business data and issue documents without needing to create a custom layout and print custom labels to assist inventory management and the organizing of your storage spaces.
Conclusion
Inventory management is essential to supporting the true work of your business — customer satisfaction and turning a profit.
The business that best control stock is the most responsive, has the best prices, and gives the best service to its customers.
Get your inventory organized now
Get a free trial version of SlabWare and see what the best inventory system of the stone industry can do for your business!
Schedule a demonstration today with our consulting team and learn how to use the unique features of Slabware and help your business control inventory and grow your sales.