Understanding your inventory — where it is, what you need to stop ordering, what you need in more quantity — is essential in the business process. Good inventory management prevents fraud by employees, assesses your current assets, balances your accounts, and provides a financial outlook. When you can take better control of your business’ inventory, you can provide better customer service.
For example, if you’re the nut and bolt supplier of hardware stores in your area, you need to know how many kilos of these items you have in your inventory and how many are being delivered to your clients every day. If you’re getting it from a manufacturer, how many do you need in a week or a month? Are you earning enough from its sales? All of these questions will be answered by the right inventory control and management. If you know what’s in your inventory, you’ll have a definitive answer to your questions.
Increased Efficiency
Your employees are sometimes forced to do a manual audit, sift through files and paperwork, and visit the warehouses every time there’s a question about a stock. These are chores that can be avoided if the business has a proper inventory system. Instead of spending time doing all the above mentioned, your employees can focus on more important tasks that have a significant impact on the company.
The Certainty of Your Inventory’s Location
If you have multiple warehouses, it will be hard to find where an item is if you do not have a well-managed inventory system. If a customer orders an item and you don’t know where it is located, you might lose the chance of making that sale. You should easily track down the items that you’re selling with good inventory practices.
Make More Sale
There are two ways not having a good inventory badly affects a business. One is when an employee informs a customer that you don’t have a stock of an item already only to find out that there’s still one or two in the warehouse. Two is when your employee tells the customer to go to another one of your branches because the item is supposedly there, then finding out later on that you’ve run out of stock or it’s in the first branch visited. In both of these situations, you’ve lost the trust and the confidence of the customer.
Meet Delivery Dates
When a warehouse has a good inventory system in place, it’s easy for businesses to track where to pick up an item for delivery. If it’s the other way around, your business will fail to make the deliveries on time, and you will create a bad reputation in the industry. Clients hate late deliveries more than anything else because it affects all their business transactions.
Inventory control is vital to the success and survival of your business. Having a good inventory is the easiest way to account for your stocks, deliverables, orders, sales, and many more. It is a simple process that shouldn’t be your business’ downfall. Developing an inventory system is easy and doesn’t need to be the reason your clients suffer.