Every eCommerce fulfillment stage is equally vital and should be treated as such if you want your packages to reach your customers. However, last-mile delivery often receives the most attention due to its importance, complex implementation, and hard-to-solve logistical issues.
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Warehouse optimization requires assessing numerous interlinked aspects and understanding how they influence each other. Appropriate pallet-storage methods are also vital for ensuring quick access and promoting smooth warehouse movement. Learning about and applying pallet-racking tips can improve worker output and safety.
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Remember the good old days when you needed giant speakers attached to a cassette player to create a proportionately huge amount of noise? Now you can do the same thing with a device that’s tinier than a driver license: Apple’s iPod.1 Smaller is clearly better in this case. That also applies to business. Indeed, we’re going to relate this to enterprise resource planning (ERP).
It’s all about volume. When it comes to boomboxes, you could turn up the volume dial to produce more sound. On the other hand, volume can also mean amount or quantity. And that is a very inventory and production planning kind of definition. So it’s not hard at all to relate the two. In this case, it just takes a little creative thinking.
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Safety stock is the number of products a business keeps on hand as a buffer to prevent stockouts. At least, that is the basic definition. But we can better illustrate what it means by using an analogy.
It’s like how your body keeps a little bit of fat on hand to burn off when food becomes scarce. A business, just like a body, shouldn’t accumulate too much fat because that can lead to all sorts of health problems. You need to find a healthy balance between gorging and starving. That is just common sense.
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2010 was a terrible year for hospitals, in terms of their inventory management. Across the country, their stock of more than 200 types of medicine fell to dangerously low levels. Just about every hospital or healthcare organization had at least one drug shortage, and 82 percent delayed treatments for patients. Why? Because they didn’t have the medicine they needed, according to an American Hospital Association survey.1
Of course, 2010 was a long time ago. Not that it’s not important. But the fact is that we’ve recently been through an experience that has put previous emergencies to shame. You might even say it’s unprecedented. That’s right. We’re talking about COVID-19.
The Covid pandemic certainly impacted hospitals and entire nations. If nothing else, it showed the importance of inventory management in hospitals. Not just to hospitals, but to every type of business. Without effective inventory management, medical supplies can’t make it to their destinations. So it’s definitely an important topic to address. It’s just interesting that most of the points that were so critical a decade ago are still exactly as pertinent to today’s crisis.
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A question every business needs to ask is: how much does inventory management software cost.1 You can’t expect to get something for nothing. But you should be able to expect high quality for the right price.
For example, you might try something extremely cheap at first. If you use a solution like Excel to manage your inventory level manually, you’re limited by its features. Excel is not designed specifically for inventory management. So it won’t be able to automate your business processes.
On the other hand, there are incredibly expensive solutions, such as ERPs. Those types of solutions are probably overkill in many ways. First, they offer too many features that a small business doesn’t need. Second, they are too expensive. What you need, most likely, is something in between the extremes. An affordable solution that will meet your needs now and grow with you in the future.
Let’s talk more about how to find the best inventory management software for you. At a reasonable price.
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Everyone is looking for a great deal. That is the case in every part of life.1 Especially in business. We want to know we’re getting a lot of value for the money and time we put into something. This is, of course, true of inventory management software.
When comparing inventory management solutions and trying to find the best deal, you should look beyond the price tag. For instance, consider hidden costs, return on investment, ease of use, and other factors that could either sweeten or break the deal for your business. All of this will help you find the most affordable inventory management software. Not only that, but it will help you find an inventory management tool that will do the job well.
With this in mind, let’s go ahead and talk about each of the points we briefly listed above. Then you’ll be able to clearly see whether or not one inventory management solution is better than another. Because you’ll have a good means of comparison.
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How many times have you heard someone say that inventory management software is essential for your business? We might be guilty of being part of that endless chorus here on the Fishbowl Blog. So, why do we need inventory management, exactly?
It is like some of the arguments you may have heard for using social media.1 “Everyone else is doing it.” “You are missing out if you don’t do it.” “There are lots of opportunities out there.” And so on. Now we are not saying there is anything wrong with social media, or inventory management system, for that matter. We are just asking, are they right for you?
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Making the ebb and flow of data as efficient as possible is a priority, especially if you’re dealing with large volumes of information that are crucial to productivity levels in your business. A number of methods are available to achieve this, and it’s common to have to choose between a flat-file architecture and an API integration.
If you’re struggling to decide, or you’re entirely new to this concept, we invite you to join us as we go over the basic principles of each, and the benefits they bring to the table.
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Right now is a great time to be alive, isn’t it? I mean, we have so much technology that makes life easier. Not only that, but it reduces the amount of time it takes to perform simple, mundane tasks. With this in mind, it’s good to step back every now and then and think about things we take for granted. Then we can acknowledge how good life is because of them. One of those things I’d like to talk about right now is effective inventory management software.
While many companies still aren’t taking advantage of it to the fullest, ones that are using it can easily forget how hard it was to manage inventory without it. So let’s go through a brief history of inventory management to see what an amazing invention inventory management software truly is.
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