In most Portuguese companies, there is a term that, even at the briefest mention, causes managers to break out in a cold sweat: inventory management.
Due to its often gigantic and even labyrinthine size, inventory is one of the most complex tasks in business management. But does taking stock have to be so difficult and labour-intensive?
The answer, as you'll see from this article, is no.
Practical tips to improve inventory management
One of the reasons why inventory is such a gruelling task for your company is due to inefficient management, which is all the more reason to take note of these seven practical suggestions for improving it:
1. Define a control process
To avoid stock shortages or unrelated references, define a control process that, among other things,
- stipulate checking routines
- a method of reception, storage and dispatch and assign clear responsibilities to each member of your team.
2. Record and identify products as soon as they are received
To avoid running the risk of a product being stored without registration, when the warehouse receives a shipment, register it immediately.
Remember, all it takes is for a product not to be properly registered to be sold or used for a chain of errors to start, the origin of which will be difficult to trace and will cause you to incur more costs.
Similarly, to achieve efficient inventory management, identify products, either manually or automatically, in terms of:
- reference
- quantity
- description
- lot
- supplier
- other relevant information
3. Check expiry dates
If your company works with perishable products, it's important that you keep a close eye on their expiry dates, otherwise you'll incur serious financial losses.
To help you with this task, we recommend that you use software that allows you to stock management which, in practice, follows the principle of FEFO stock management (first out first in) pharmacies and large food distributors.
In practice, it tells you that the first product to be dispatched is the one closest to its expiry date.
4. Monitor stock regularly
Despite payment solutions REDUNIQ helps you to have a more complete and detailed view of the products you sell, it is important that you regularly monitor your stock so that you can act in advance and avoid losses.
5. Keep in close contact with suppliers
When you notice an error or a stock shortage in a product category, it's important that you act quickly to minimise waiting times for customers and possible financial losses.
To make all this run more smoothly and quickly, maintain close contact with your suppliers so that you can acquire a product more quickly or resolve a problem related to the lack of quality of a given batch in good time.
In addition to gains in inventory management efficiency and optimisation of reservations, this suggestion can give you access to discounts.
6. Make an estimate
Although it's difficult to estimate what you have in stock, especially when working with many different references, take the following aspects into account to calculate more accurately what you have in stock and what you need:
- Sales from the previous year;
- Seasonality;
- Current year growth rate;
- Market trends;
- Sales already contracted.
7. clean the warehouse regularly
We're not talking about broom and bucket cleaning, but the act of getting rid of obsolete or unused products that you have in storage.
To do this, you can carry out a promotions or salesdonate the items or, if there is still time, return them to the supplier.
How can automation help reduce inventory costs?
As has been the case in other areas of business management, inventory automation has gained prominence in the market over the last few years due to the various financial and logistical advantages it brings to the organisation.
By using specific software and equipment, inventory automation ends up controlling all the tasks related to the inventory. stock management in a centralised way, which ultimately results in more informed, assertive and real-time decision-making.
In addition to managing all the products received, stored and dispatched in real time, inventory automation quickly and efficiently calculates the volume, weight, quantity and value of each product, thus enabling the goods to be better organised in the warehouse without human interference.
Strategies to avoid product shortages and overstocking
To prevent a particular product from running out or your warehouse from being overstocked and causing you high financial and efficiency losses, take note of these three strategies:
Warehouse Management System (WMS)
O Warehouse Management System (WMS) is stock management software that not only forecasts stock requirements according to demand, but also optimises workflow, prevents shortages or excesses of stored products and establishes the most appropriate picking routes.
Storage systems
Whether analogue or automated, a storage system adapted to your company's needs will allow you to make the most of your storage capacity and avoid shortages or excesses of any type of product.
For example, by installing retractable shelving and digital labelling, you can adjust the capacity of your warehouse according to the orders you receive.
Just-in-time production and cross-docking logistics
Through a production model just-in-time which implies product stock necessary to fulfil existing orders or logistics cross-dockingBy eliminating the need to store the product, you can manage your company's stock more efficiently.
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