Stocking Up: How to Get Started With Inventory Management
Oftentimes, the speed at which a business can grow depends upon its ability to move items efficiently, track quantities, keep on top of paperwork and maintain staff productivity.
Balancing all these factors seems a heavy task but, with the right techniques, inventory management needn’t weigh a business down.
Understanding Inventory
The advantages of proper inventory maintenance are lost on many startups.
It may not always appear crucial at an early stage but your long-term business health is often dependent upon a number of small or hidden variables such as quality control, labeling, correct stocking, and accurate quantifying.
For example, if you send the wrong or a faulty item, you potentially lose not only money but also a repeat customer.
Learning to limit these occurrences is important now, as you develop the habits you’ll practice for years to come.
Administration
The administration is a vital aspect of inventory management. Without someone running desk work, small businesses often struggle to keep on top of their logistics.
Your first point of action, therefore, should be to leverage more time in the day to deal with basic bureaucracy.
One good strategy for this is to form an LLC (Limited Liability Company).
This will help to reduce your day-to-day paperwork and make business running more streamline. Make sure to check your state regulations, as laws differ.
If you haven’t already, it’s also essential that you choose and download inventory management software.
The advantages of these are tenfold but, in a nutshell, they allow you to track and organize your warehouse digitally – helping you to avoid overstocking and stay on top of sales, orders, and returns.
Crucially, they act as a point of reference for all levels of employment, as someone who works on the warehouse floor will be able to log any actions and make them visible to someone in the office.
Controlling Inventory
Over time, you’ll learn that inventory management benefits from skill and experience.
There are a number of simple techniques that you should familiarize yourself with to expedite your process and to share with any employees.
It’s vital, for example, that you correctly label your inventory based on value so that you can forecast demand and prioritize the safe handling of goods that are worth more to your business.
It’s easy to forget that storage space actually represents value in a business.
It’s therefore important to balance your inventory, ensuring that you’re only holding the necessary raw materials and liquidating any excess dead stock.
Make sure you’re carrying out regular inventory audits to ensure that nothing is held for too long and that your reorder points are set in the right quantities.
Avoiding Pitfalls
Without careful monitoring, stock mistakes can prove wasteful and costly.
To avoid misorders and inventory loss, you’ll have to consistently track, learn to read data, and manage your orders with an eye on the future.
But mitigating accidents is less about your individual actions and more to do with the overall process – a greater focus on automation will limit the incidence of human error.
Some human elements cannot be avoided, however. In any role involving physical labor, you’re bound to get a few slip-ups, wrong postings, or missing items.
Usually, these can be limited by careful shift scheduling, job allocation, and time tracking to ensure that the right hands are at work during the right times and that your personnel is never working tired.
Make sure that you’re utilizing your software to facilitate this.
At the end of the day, you need to get products to your customers on time and in good condition or your business is at risk.
Making sure this happens requires that you stay diligent, observant, and, most importantly, up-to-date with technology