Top 5 Benefits of Inventory Management System

To me, the benefits of inventory management software are very clear:

1. Achieve efficiency and productivity in operations.
2. Minimise inventory costs and maximize sales & profits.
3. Integrate your entire business.
4. Automation of manual tasks.
5. Maintain customer happiness.

1. Efficiency & Productivity in Operations

Keeping stock means tying up your money in them. You can’t spend this money.

You want efficiency in managing your stock levels so that your business is cash flow positive. We all know what happens when your business runs out of cash, never mind profits.

Also, analytics and reports can help you see what products are selling fast through your multiple sales channels. This helps you make smarter purchasing decisions and you might be able to spot a trend or two!

Do you need to manage product and batches and expiry dates?

This is important for the health, beauty and pharmaceutical industries.

How about managing multi-matrix product variants? Or handling complex units of measurement?

All these are possible with an inventory management solution.

2. Minimise Costs, Maximise Sales & Profits

You need to manage orders across your sales channels. This way you can minimise the loss of sales when, say, you need to restock the next big thing for the holiday season.

Inventory control is also critical if you want to minimise the carrying costs of holding stock. Keeping stock in warehouses is expensive!

3. Integration of Entire Business

Let’s say your sales rep closes a sale and creates a sales order. Inventory management software lets the rest of your company work with it as it makes its way from sales to fulfillment.

Let’s see how this is done.

Firstly, user management. You create user accounts for each staff in your company’s departments: management, administration, sales, purchasing, and fulfillment.

You define job roles and then assign user permissions to each user. Thus, they only have access to modules and functions for their job responsibilities. This prevents them from having access to stock adjustments or transfers, for example, or from viewing confidential financial reports.

Secondly, tasks and notes enable collaboration between members of your team. Your staff can seamlessly share and handover information. Collaborate on customers, suppliers, products, invoices, sales orders and shipments.

Everyone has full visibility in the order until it is fulfilled.

Thirdly, for fulfillment, your operations team can easily create a shipment. They can then pack all the items and quantity in the sales order that has not yet been shipped. Within the delivery order, they can also issue picking and packing lists to the warehouse team to ship. When the order has been received by the customer, the team can mark it as delivered.

Finally, your accountant can filter sales orders by their shipment status.

The finance department can then issue invoices for those orders that have been shipped. These same customer invoices can be quickly listed and marked as paid when payment is received. Or have a credit note issued to the customer for product returns.

4. Automation of Manual Tasks