Using the latest technology to improve your stock control can streamline your business, reduce costs, and ultimately increase productivity. So if you haven’t invested in up-to-date technology to manage your inventory, read this article to find out why you should.
Importing Time Management
Stock control technology will save you both time and money. It will keep track of the products you have in stock and the items you’ve ordered in from suppliers too.
This means that you won’t need to do a stock-take every time you order new lines or sell high volumes of specific products. It can also help you save money, because you won’t waste any capital stocking up on slow-moving items. Instead, you can concentrate on buying in the products that your customers love to order.
To save time, stock control technology can help you to immediately identify where the package is from and where it should go. It sounds simple, but in a large warehouse with a wide range of stock arriving and leaving all simultaneously, software can help to provide clarity and efficiency.
Enhancing Inventories
Improving your stock management can also help you work out how much inventory you need to meet demand. This will aid you in avoiding shortages that can slow up your business and prevent your customers from ordering what they want, when they want it. It will also assist you in making sure that you don’t have too much surplus at any one time on slow-moving products.
Winning Repeat Custom
Customers only come back for more if they receive an efficient and helpful service. So if you want them to choose your company again and again, it’s important to have a streamlined service.
Stock control technology can, for example, ensure that the stock received accurately matches the inventory that was ordered. This process typically used to be completed on paper, with employees manually ticking off each item received one by one. Both time-consuming and sometimes ineffective, this method could lead to confusion and the incorrect stock being received, especially in busy warehouses. Stock control technology, on the other hand, automatically identifies if the correct stock has been delivered – saving time, preventing human error, and ensuring that customers receive their orders quickly and efficiently.
Organising Your Warehouses
Any decent stock management system will enable you to organise your warehouses. Stock management software will help you identify your best-selling products, as well as which items are most likely to sell seasonally, and those you need to keep on standby. In turn, this will help to keep your customers happy, and will ensure that your warehouse operations run smoothly.
Unfortunately, many businesses still operate by identifying any empty areas in their warehouses and adding new stock to a location without proper strategic thought. This process can be time-consuming and inefficient, because it can be difficult to create a logical picking order to aid the warehouse operatives to find items quickly. Stock control software can help with this by organising and identifying the areas in which new stock should be added to create the fastest picking routes and consolidated stock bays.
Increasing Productivity
Stock management software, processes, and mobile warehouse technology like barcode scanners, will help to improve the efficiency of your business. Such tools help to reduce manual processes, so that staff can focus on other tasks and reduce errors.
It can also help to streamline the stock-taking process, thereby reducing the amount of time they take, and the hours employees have to invest.
In addition to this, technology can help to organise stock as it’s being moved from A to B. Whether items are being moved from one warehouse to another, or between shops, such software can help to manage these processes. It can also let you know when stock needs to be replaced in a specific area, whether this is due to high customer demand, low stock levels, and even when high sales are predicted for the coming months.
Mobile warehousing is an increasingly popular technology that is helping to increase business productivity in an easy and convenient way. This technology allows staff to quickly and easily scan products and stock locations every time an item is moved, ensuring that the warehouse is highly productive, functional and accuracies are maintained.
Choose Exact Abacus to Help You Manage Your Stock
There are clearly many advantages to using stock control technology – from increasing productivity and saving money, to encouraging repeat custom and improving overall organisation efficiency. Find out more about our stock control software and how it can help to streamline your business.
by Gemma Tomlinson on 10/05/2017
