Optimising stock levels is essential to ensure that your business doesn’t have unnecessary overheads tied up in excess stock. The alternative to this is running out of stock if your inventory control is managed badly. Either way, stock levels can have a massive impact on business cashflow and optimising your inventory management is one of the most effective ways to gain control of your finances.
Good inventory control means that the right products are on the right shelves, at the right time and in the right quantity, with no excess or obsolete stock. It means that your business can maximise profits while minimising inventory investment and ensuring you have the right stock available to meet demand and ensure customer satisfaction. At its most basic level, it is also about knowing what is stored where, item quantities and ensuring that your stock is stored correctly.
Many companies still rely on spreadsheets to manage their stock, but this is ineffective and makes additional work for staff. Repetitive manual processes and duplication of data between systems is inefficient, wasting time and creating additional costs. It is also hard to find information and gain insight into stock levels, which can cause hold-ups in manufacturing, sales, and distribution processes. Good inventory control is such an important contributor to an organisation’s efficiency and profitability that it doesn’t make sense to rely on error-prone, manual methods. Without the right tools in place though, the job of the inventory control manager is very difficult.
How can you gain the insight you need to optimise your inventory management?
An integrated ERP solution, such as SAP Business One, will resolve your inventory control issues by providing a streamlined solution that automates manual processes. By providing a ‘single source of truth’ that integrates all departments, you will gain much greater insight into the state of your business. Some of the inventory control issues SAP Business One can help with are:
- Optimising stock levels so you have the right amount of materials or finished goods to meet customer demand. This reduces overheads and the financial impact of having unsold goods or unused raw materials taking up space, or the potential wastage of raw materials passing their expiry dates.
- Reducing stock-outs of products, which can result in lost sales, backorders, and dissatisfied customers.
- Insight into product availability and where stock is located, avoiding time wastage and reducing inefficiency.
- Reporting facilities which provide detailed insight to support strategic decisions.
Optimising inventory control also contributes to positive customer and supplier relationships. Being able to fulfil orders on time and communicate effectively with customers increases customer satisfaction and positively affects your reputation, particularly in an increasingly competitive market. SAP Business One provides real-time inventory visibility across the operations and supply chain, providing detailed insight to support decision making and further optimise inventory management.
SAP Business One has advanced inventory management features that give businesses the ability to manage different types of items with straight-forward tagging, classification and item analysis. Multiple units of measure, stock and bin location, valuation methods, product expiry dates and batch numbers are easy to manage, providing real-time visibility and effective analysis and control. It enables you to maintain accurate stock levels, with insight into when new stock needs to be ordered, avoiding unnecessary wastage, and decreasing overhead costs. The risk of running out of raw materials during the production process is also reduced. Full integration with barcode scanning solutions speeds up stock-picking and increases accuracy, providing real-time information on stock levels. Advanced analytics can provide information to forecast future stock requirements, which helps the purchasing department with their planning.
SAP Business One is very easy to use with an intuitive user-interface that means users can quickly adapt to using its functionality to increase efficiency and automate processes. Automating inventory control with an ERP system, such as SAP Business One, should be a priority for any growing business. The detailed insight that a system like this provides will help future-proof the business and set it up for the long-term, with the information it needs to optimise stock levels, reduce overheads, and support strategic decision making to help it compete successfully in an ever-changing market. For more information on how SAP Business One can help your company optimise stock levels, please contact our friendly team now.