A perfect inventory management system should be quite simple enough for small businesses to understand and use in their day-to-day operations, yet it is advanced enough to cover all of their business needs. They should be allowed to save time and money and avoid the headache of the dreaded inventory that hits business owners trying to track their many assets. And most importantly, you must do all of this without breaking the bank.
Inventory challenges
Inventory tracking is an essential part of doing business. It is the way that companies remain supplied with all the necessary products they need to sell to customers and carry out daily operations. When products are sold, they must be renewed at a rate that strikes a healthy balance between the extremes of surplus stocks and stocks. If you have a lot of items, your pregnancy costs go up, and you have less space to sell more items. If you have an item in low quantity, you will miss out on sales, your customers will be disappointed, and will likely turn to a competitor to meet their needs.
Supply and demand are not continuous. It often changes with the season and over the life of the product. Therefore, managing inventory successfully means hitting a moving target. Not only that, but your warehouse staff is not fixed. Staff turnover means that you need to continually train new people on how to set up your inventory system and the processes it has so that everything runs smoothly. If you don’t have written or video documents, this can be a very daunting task. But what happens if your warehouse manager or someone else in charge of the system leaves the company? Do you have more than one expert on your system?
There is also the problem of tracking inventory with different units of measure and suppliers at their rates. Let’s not forget the challenge of keeping up with government laws, regulations, and audits. Many companies must comply with standards set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Office of Tobacco, Alcohol, Firearms, and Explosives, and other government agencies and bodies. Otherwise, a business can be closed and possibly even prosecuted. When there is a recall of the product, you should be able to find all the items in your inventory that are subject to this recall and show the documents that you send through your supply chain and warehouse to the end-user.
While it is possible to overcome these and other problems on your own, using the inventory management system and software is much less stressful and much quicker to take on most of the hard work for you.
ERP Solution for Managing the Inventory
The best solution for inventory tracking is to find ERP solutions for SMEs to stay in for many years. Make sure you can handle what you need to do before making a final decision. You don’t want to have to change systems every few years when you discover that the method you used can’t handle more complex requirements like multiple locations, barcode scanning, and production stages. It is a waste of time and money.
Your must-have software features that are simple enough to dominate small businesses and can also be expanded to meet the increasingly complex needs of the same company year after year. PPTSquare’s ERP solution is a useful tool that fits your bill.
