Successful businesses often produce a lot of waste. From recycling cardboard boxes to dealing with returns, an inventory control app can help businesses stay clean. Find out how to reduce waste and speed up recycling with an inventory management software.
Waste Is Natural
Any disorganized form of inventory management and control produces waste. This waste increases with the number of locations and storehouses the business use. It appears during almost every stage of the business cycle. From the moment vendor shipments come in, throughout the product presentation in store, to the actual sale.
Returns and Other Waste
Returns can easily create waste in the form of extra packaging, damaged items, or return forms. But few small businesses have effective recycling and waste disposal systems for this. The often unpredictable condition of these items don’t make matters any easier.
Products that sit for a long time on shelves or in a warehouse may also lead to waste. This usually happens with products at the end of their shelf life. Also with those replaced by a newer generation of products.
The Benefits of Inventory Control
When dealing with returns or shelf-bound products, an inventory control app becomes useful. In addition to up to date quantities, and it can show the exact location of these items. This allows for the creation of a waste disposal or recycling center in a favorable location.
You can establish this center in the backroom of a store or warehouse with minimal resources. The protocol for waste disposal and recycling can be as short as a page. It may include a simple actionable guide for sorting and dealing with the items in question.
How Forecasting Helps
A forecasting tool for small business also helps. Waste within a business is often the result of insufficient data. An online inventory app like DataQlick brings all your product data together.
At the same time, it uses a wealth of metrics to gauge the performance of your stock. You are able to check return rates for individual items and find out which items get returned the most. You can also track slow-moving inventory. While the actual numbers may vary from season to season, you’ll have enough data to create a simple waste disposal policy.
Improving Recycling
An inventory control app can also help with recycling. For many products today, recycling is not possible, or else very costly. Product data can be better managed with an inventory management software. Businesses can mark products that can be recycled. A simple note in the product’s inventory entry helps employees recycle the product or parts of it.
For example, recyclable packaging for bulk products often becomes unnecessary. But if you don’t keep track of it, it may end up with common trash. When you manage inventory on a spreadsheet, keeping track of packaging feels like a chore.
But with the data from an inventory control app, store staff know exactly what packaging comes in. Recycling notes included in the order then helps you reuse the packaging.
Poor Inventory Management = More Waste
Waste disposal and recycling are especially big problems for small businesses. These problems often stem from a lack of a waste disposal and recycling policy. But they are also the result of slow, inaccurate, or poor inventory management. All too often, the result is a storage room in disorder and a big heap of trash for the garbage man.
To change all that, a business can adopt an inventory control app. It can help inventory managers track every product and bundle or kit in stock. If the product doesn’t end up in the customer’s shopping cart, you can deal with it before it becomes trash.
With an inventory control app, you improve inventory management and reduce waste. At the same time, you create better conditions for recycling products. You zoom into your stock and understand it better than you ever did.
Quite often, this is all you need to improve your waste and recycling policy. You may even find that you can recycle products you used to throw away. Or that you can dispose of waste more cheaply by gathering it together.
In conclusion, when you improve your inventory control, your business becomes more environmentally-friendly.
