Every business, however small, is exposed to inventory control risks. Like most companies, your business has probably invested a considerable amount of money in inventory. That investment, as well as your ability to fulfill orders and meet customer expectations, depends to a large extent on how well you are able to manage risks. The good news is that a cloud inventory control app can help you mitigate the biggest inventory control risks. Discover what these risks are and how an inventory control solution can help.
Lost Inventory
Losing inventory not only reduces the equity of your business, but may also trigger unforeseen understock issues which can led to unfulfilled orders, slow order processing, and shipment delays. Inventory loss can be caused by warehouse items that go missing, poor product inventorying, failed barcode scanning, shipment errors, and more.
Having a digital, easy to access, real-time mobile inventory management tool can help you prevent or minimize many of the causes that lead to lost inventory. At the same time, it can help you deal with lost items more effectively by keeping track of them in real time.
Damaged Inventory
While some inventory damage is usually unavoidable in the long run, selling and shipping fragile items can make damaged products a major problem for any company. Using reliable shipping companies to move products between warehouses or stores and customers usually helps alleviate the problem, as does establishing a strict warehouse product handling policy to deter careless handling.
Using a cloud inventory control app also helps, by enabling you to keep a tighter control over your stock even when it’s in transit, as well as to use built-in business analysis tools to identify the locations or the products with the highest damage rates in order to understand how you can address the problem.
Degradable Inventory
Even if your inventory has a long shelf life, each product ultimately has a life cycle — once it reaches its market maturity and the peak in demand, its value begins to decline as customers become interested in newer, better alternatives from the same manufacturer or from a different company.
The problem of degradable inventory, whether it’s inventory nearing the end of its life cycle or that of its shelf life running out, can only be managed using a dynamic approach to inventory management, where stock condition and stock location are regularly checked. Yet another advantage of a cloud-based inventory control solution is that it provides real-time information on your stock, helping you find out everything you need to know about it, including location, shelf life, and demand within one intuitive interface.
To effectively mitigate inventory control risks using a cloud inventory control app, it’s important to choose an intuitive solution that offers the right mix of features and enough scalability for you to be able to use it in the long term. Used intelligently, DataQlick can help you keep inventory control risks in check.