Effective inventory management is an act of balancing the needs and demands of the production team with those of the sales department and inventory manager. The availability of goods and materials, as determined by the supplier, must also be taken into account. Inventory management is a matter of pressing concern for any business, whether it manufactures its own products or merely resells the products of other manufacturers, and it’s hardly an easy task. There are, however, three essential components to inventory management which any business can use to build an effective stock management system. Discover them below.
1. Inventory Forecast Analytics
Understanding customer demand levels and patterns is one of the most difficult things for inventory managers. Gut feeling sometimes helps, but sometimes it doesn’t, and without a specialized forecasting system and a set of practices, sales forecasting can become a kind of guesswork that costs your business time and money. The solution is professional forecast analytics such as those provided by an inventory analysis and planning app, which are based on mathematical and statistical procedures. The data that a sales and inventory software for small business like DataQlick provides in the form of stats and visualizations takes the guesswork out of forecasting and uses facts drawn from past sales to guide your stock orders.
2. Optimized Purchase Orders
Today there are more suppliers than ever, but this doesn’t make purchase orders any easier to make. Increasingly complex supply chain models can also be a problem. Safety stocks promise to solve the problem, but they tie up capital, which is often the last thing a small business needs. Managing availability and cost becomes a lot easier with an inventory analysis and planning app with an intelligent purchase order feature such as DataQlick.
3. Inventory Control
Laborious inventory management is simplified with careful inventory control, creating a stock transparency that ultimately makes the financial aspect of managing the inventory more effective and optimizing storage space. Manual inventory control suffers from slowness and is prone to errors. Because quick actions and accurate data are critical to make inventory control effective, inventory control software is becomes a must, especially when it enables the simulation of stock data to predict potentially dangerous inventory scenarios.
In the end, for most small and medium sized businesses, the obvious solution to effective inventory management is an inventory analysis and planning app with powerful inventory control features, such as DataQlick. Packed with inventory management features yet easy to use, DataQlick offers you full control over your inventory, including accurate sales forecasts, potent analytics, and a user-friendly, tab-based interface.
