As a distributor or manufacturer (or both!) inventory can be the part of your business that consumes most of your management time and money. This doesn’t have to be.
Simplifying inventory management while reducing the amount of cash it ties up is one of the top reasons for changing accounting systems. Questions about inventory stock levels, pricing, order availability, and sales behavior too often drive a need for inventory specialist who spends all of their time buried in paper, excel sheets, and phone calls. The right accounting system, the right decision-assist tools, integrations with your suppliers, and an appropriate warehouse management system really can bring all of this into a readily understood and controlled center.
We can help you untangle this problem and bring sanity to your current near-madness. Oh – it also brings happier customers, higher margins more cash.
Can you afford this? First, take a measure of your current performance. This short entry from our DSD Systems partner’s blog covers the basics of key measures to calculate:
- Gross Margin
- Average Inventory Level
- Item Fill Rate
- Turnover Ratio
Start there. Get your baseline. Now determine three things to improve which would make those. Odds are that to make those improvements you must change the way you capture and handle the inventory data from PO to receipt to stocking to customer shipment. This usually involves both a technology enhancement and training for improved practices.
One goal is to easily and regularly get accurate reports on the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators like the four above) so you can track and encourage progress toward the improvements. This reporting must be automatic and reliable to be effective. Dashboards and alerts are natural parts of this.
Need some help getting started? Call us and we can help you plot an Inventory Control Roadmap that is right for you! (512)419-1444 x112.