Inventory management must be part and parcel of your business if you’re a product based company. As a merchant, there is no way you can run away from it. You have to be smart about the whole ordeal though. To do this, all you need to do is automate your inventory. This will make reporting easy. It will also save you time and of course, money. But is it really worth it when you can always choose to remain with the old, conventional and traditional way of managing your inventory? Read on to learn more.
Scalability
Coming up with a scalable business model always relies on the systems you choose to put in place. Entering inventory in a spreadsheet document is not in any way scalable. If anything, it is time consuming and prone to errors that can see you make huge losses. Calling and emailing your employees to find out how much inventory you still have at hand on a given month is also not scalable. In a nutshell, spending an hour or two analyzing and processing data from different locations is an old way of doing things. It minimizes scalability instead of maximizing it.
Automating your inventory stands out as a savior here. It will make it easy for you to gather information within a short time. This will in turn help you make timely decisions that may prove to be beneficial to your business.
Decreasing Human Error
Human errors when it comes to inventory management can easily prove to be costly. This is especially where you have to work on spreadsheet templates. It is easy to understand why this is the case. Manual entry in inventory spreadsheets always open opportunities for marginal errors especially where figures are concerned. One therefore ends up underselling or overselling. Keep in mind too that several members of your team will need to first access so as to edit and update inventory data. These changes can go unsaved and may be even unnoticed if user access is limited. This quickly decreases product stocking and reporting accuracy. At the same time, it increasing the likelihood of costly errors as well as purchasing and stocking issues.
Real Time Visibility
Spreadsheets mean you will always lack real time inventory. That’s not all. Items orders back will turn into missed sales opportunities. Customers on the other hand who wind up purchasing items that have been stocked out will encounter several technical issues.
Apart from the obvious potential frustration and eventual loss of your customers, your customer service staff will be forced to spend time reconciling inventory. You may also be forced to consider giving out discounts and promotions as a desperate measure to retain or appease angry customers. Keep in mind that there could be hundreds or even thousands of customers affected. Your best bet is to therefore avoid such expenses by wholly embracing automated inventory management.
There are of course, other obvious benefits. You can for instance, track your inventory from wherever you are. This will however depend on the inventory management service provider you choose to go for.