Inventory management is usually a pain point for small business owners. Without a working strategy, businesses could easily make huge mistakes, such as tying up capital due to excess inventory or missed opportunities for sales because of lack of products.
Follow these guidelines to help you create an inventory management strategy that would work for you:
Make a plan and execute it right.
Inventory management should be a concentrated and continuous process that ideally should involve key departments, including warehouse, marketing, merchandising, sales, and e-commerce. Think about this: if you take cues from your promotional calendar, your merchandising department could easily figure out how much to order, which products to order, and when.
In turn, your fulfilment team would know when and how much warehouse space they would need, and your e-commerce and sales teams could anticipate the increase in customer queries and such, and plan accordingly.
Organise your warehouse.
Create accurate labels and signs for directing your warehouse team throughout the space and help them locate inventory easily and quickly. In addition, you need to make certain that your inventory is in appropriate packaging to avoid damages, note packline.com.au and other packaging experts.
Implement compliance policies.
Set operating procedures are immensely crucial to help ensure that your daily warehouse operations run smoothly. You should create and implement policies that your warehouse team, merchandisers, and suppliers should follow to make certain that your items would be chosen, stocked, received, and shipped accurately and efficiently without negatively affecting your inventory.
This could include product specs sheets, shipping guidelines, billing guidelines, as well as instructions for stocking and packaging.
Managing your inventory does not have to feel like a tedious and endless cycle of selecting, receiving, packing, inspecting, and shipping. You just need to start somewhere, preferably with the guidelines mentioned above and adjust your processes as needed. This way, your warehousing operations could run without hitches, items could be selected faster, customers would get their orders on time, and your employees could do their work better.
