Understanding the Role of Software Inventory Management
Last Updated: April 11, 2023
Summary:With inventory management software, you can do sales forecasting, manage multiple warehouses, and view the stock data in a centralized database. What else can you use it for? Find out below!
Improper management of inventory is one of the major reasons why businesses fail in the long run. They face issues like inconsistent inventory tracking, limited visibility into stock processes, inaccurate data entry, and insufficient order management.
However, inventory management software can solve a lot of these problems by tracking inventory levels in real time, optimizing the stock levels, managing product supplier details, and much more. The main purpose of inventory software is to ensure an optimum level of inventory for better selling procedures.
What is Inventory Management Software?
Inventory software helps with maintaining and tracking inventory items and their related procedures. It further helps with bills creation, order management, and inventory-related documents management. Some of the most efficient inventory management software solutions also offer sales forecasting to help in making smarter business decisions.
Why Your Business Needs Inventory Management Software?
Track all the inventory items and provide a centralized view of the available stock.
Keep a check on the costs through the analysis of stock items.
Enhance stock delivery by managing stock-ins and outs and improving customer expectations.
Make forecasts for demand through analyzing the stock selling trends.
Manage multiple warehouse operations in real-time.
Key Takeaways
1. Organizations that use RFID tagging have inventory accuracy almost up to 95% 2. The demand for inventory management solutions has doubled in the past 5 years 3. Asia-Pacific region has been dominating the inventory management software market because of higher demand for the RFID technology 4. Item-level tagging with the inventory management software can help in improving inventory accuracy almost from 63% to 95%
Unlocking the Potential of Inventory Management with Inventory Management Software (Features)
Inventory management solutions includes several features to simplify the task of stock tracking and management. It comes with features like inventory tracking, stock optimizing, stock reordering, purchase order managing, and much more.
Manage Multi-Channel Operations: Keep track of inventory levels across different sales channels including marketplaces, ecommerce, wholesale, retail, etc.
Track Real-time Data and Analytics to Improve Operations: With inventory software, track and analyze sales, inventory, and accounting data in real time. This will help in improving the overall business operations.
Use Predictive Analytics to Plan for Future Demand: With predictive analytics, the production manager can study sales trends and predict the product’s demand.
CASE STUDY Company:Olympic Fixings is a wholesale distributor of multiple products Challenges:The company could not make informed purchasing decisions because their software did not have advanced forecasting functionality. Solution:With Easy Stock, the company generated a report and studied the current stock information and historical sales data to predict the upcoming stock demand. Impact:It helped them to study the sales pattern properly and optimize their stock levels as per the product demand.
Stock Tracking and Inventory Control: Track the inventory levels in real time through barcode scanning to know the inventory items flowing in and out of your warehouse or store. You can also learn about stock availability, sales and purchase orders, and much more.
Automated Reordering and Restocking: The solution automatically sends alerts for reorder when the stock items reach a pre-determined reorder point. This ensures that the business has enough stock supply to meet the customers’ demands.
Barcode Scanning and Data Entry: Create barcodes for the products with their name, type, pricing, etc., with the help of inventory software. By scanning the barcode, the product info will be auto filled into the system.
Multi-Location Inventory Management: Track and manage inventory items of multiple facilities from a single location including stock levels, purchase orders, delivery details, etc.
Optimize Your Stock and Boost Your Bottom Line: Maintain the perfect balance between supply and demand of stocks to eliminate higher storage costs and stock out situations. This can be done through real-time inventory tracking, sales forecasting, etc.
CASE STUDY Company:Araco International is a wholesaler of promotional gifts Challenges: The company faced issues with managing the growing product range, which included diverse products including seasonal items. Solution: With EazyStock inventory management software, Araco gained better insights into their seasonal products and demand patterns for their products. Impact: Through inventory optimization software, the company was able to decide on the focus stock categories. As a result, there was a 12% excess inventory reduction rate, and they were able to manage their product catalogue better.
Reporting and Analytics: Generate and analyze different reports for inventory turnover rate, supplier delivery, cycle, purchase returns, and so on. This will help businesses to know about revenue generated, highest selling products, defective products, incurred costs, etc.
Product and Supplier management: The solution simplifies the task of evaluating and choosing suppliers, negotiating product pricing, and maintaining good relationships with them.
Sales and Purchase Order Management: Easily create and manage sales and purchase orders cycle, edit or delete them, convert them into invoices, and more.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Integration: The integration with EDI would help in exchanging bills, order documents, supplier data, and inventory reports electronically with other servers or vendors.
Mobile Inventory Management: With it, users can scan barcodes, update stock levels, manage purchase orders, and do a lot more through smartphones.
Real-Time Inventory Updates and Notifications: It provides real-time inventory updates for stock replenishment, expired and returned products automatically.
Benefits of Inventory Optimization Software
The incorporation of software inventory management procedures can help with better stock management, reduced data inaccuracies, and fewer incidences of under stock or over stock. Some other benefits of using inventory software include:
Higher Productivity:Benefits of Inventory optimization software reduces the time spent on various procedures like inventory tracking and updating, fulfilling purchase orders, etc. This lets businesses focus on more important aspects to improve their business operations.
Better Profitability: By tracking the highest and lowest selling products, the company can learn which products are generating more revenue, thereby improving profitability.
Reduces Aged Inventory and Deadstock: After sorting inventory items by date, businesses know the stock items that are about to expire. This is important especially for perishable items like food having a short expiry date. Therefore, software reduces resource wastage by providing real-time updates on the aged inventory items.
Automate Manual Inventory Tasks: The right software will automate tasks like stock counting and recounting, order fulfillment, price calculation, stock update, etc. This will save time and prevent manual data entry errors.
Better Customer Service: Keeping a check on the inventory levels enables businesses to have enough product supply to meet customer demands. Therefore, helping them to serve their customers in a better way.
Lessens the Chance of Stock-Outs: With the inventory management solution, organizations get real-time low stock levels alerts, inventory valuation, stock quantity updates, and so on. This reduces the stock out chances and ensures equilibrium between its demand and supply.
Accurate Expense Tracking: Inventory solution creates multiple reports to calculate the total sales, inventory valuation, etc. This helps to keep a tab on the inventory costs and revenue generated annually.
Useful Integrations with Inventory Management Solution
Accounting Software: This integration would help in syncing all the accounting data along with bills and invoices created by the software. Further, you can use the sales data to make predictions for future demand and convert purchase orders directly into invoices.
Warehouse management software: This integration would help in managing inventory of multiple warehouses, view inventory movement across multiple locations, etc. It will also help to manage the warehouse’s workforce from a single platform.
eCommerce Software: Integrating the easy to use inventory management software with e-commerce software would help with directly importing sales orders, managing orders fulfillment, monitoring product availability, and fulfilling sales orders on time.
Distribution management software: Through this integration, you can effectively manage distribution channels across the entire supply chain. It will help in managing the distributor’s profile and tracking orders throughout the entire value chain directly. Further, you can also handle the purchase orders of multiple suppliers from your inventory software.
Billing & Invoicing software: With this software, businesses can create multiple types of invoices for their customers and e-invoices. Further, it helps with sales orders conversion into invoices and shares them with customers through communication channels.
Order Management Software: With this integration, businesses can manage orders from multiple sales channels, print package labels, maintain the data repository of all orders, and so on.
Dropshipping software: Dropshipping software integration with your inventory software can help in finding drop shippers, managing supplier details, creating product descriptions, etc. It can also be used to manage customer queries and product replacement-related requests.
Supply Chain Management Software: Through this integration, users can track goods across the supply chain, manage labor across multiple warehouses and track the delivery status.
How to Choose the Best Inventory Management Software?
The best inventory software will help in streamlining all the inventory operations. To choose the right solution, you can consider the following factors:
Inventory Barcoding: The software should come with inventory barcoding feature to easily identify, categorize, and quantify inventory items through alphanumeric coding.
Integration: The solution must be integrated with e-commerce, shipping, accounting solutions, etc.
Scalability: The ability to scale major features will help businesses to manage their increasing inventory levels.
Returns Management: Choose a solution that lets you manage all your product returns, recollect, and exchange them with a better product for customers.
Inventory Forecasting: With inventory forecasting, you will be able to study past inventory data and sales patterns to predict the required stock levels for future demand.
Product Catalogue Creation: Product catalogue creation would help in easily searching for any specific product through the wide variety of available options.
Proper inventory management is crucial for the success of any business. Constantly monitoring stock levels, performing inventory forecasting, and optimizing inventory through inventory software would ensure cost optimization and higher profitability.
Varsha is an experienced content writer at Techjockey. She has been writing since 2021 and has covered several industries in her writing like fashion, technology, automobile, interior design, etc.
Over the span of 1 year, she has written 100+ blogs focusing on security, finance, accounts, inventory, human resources, etc. Her expertise is centered around writing articles on cloud computing, cloud migration, and data security. Being a keen learner, she is constantly improving herself in the field of software and technology.
