With all the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, the future might look bleak. But Fishbowl has several inventory management and other business tools that can help you turn uncertainty into an opportunity to grow. While your competitors are struggling to stay afloat, you can leap ahead of them by implementing the following advanced tools and strategies.
1. Work from Home with Fishbowl Hosted Services
Everyone is being encouraged to practice social distancing and stay inside as much as possible. Many businesses are having to improvise ways for their employees to work from home, and Fishbowl Hosted Services allows you to do that with ease. Securely access your files at the office from a desktop computer at your house or any other location you like. Plus, Fishbowl Hosted Services handles server maintenance, data backups, and other important IT tasks, so you can focus on doing your job.
2. Access Your Inventory Data from Any Location with Fishbowl Anywhere
Fishbowl Anywhere is a plugin that lets you access your Fishbowl Server on practically any desktop, laptop, or tablet with an Internet connection. This is another solution that helps you work from home and stay informed on what sales orders you have coming in, what purchase orders you have going out, and other important inventory management data.
3. Reduce Staff Requirements with Fishbowl Go
Empower your employees to get more done by downloading the Fishbowl Go app onto a mobile device to turn it into a barcode scanner and more. Then your employees can use it to cycle count, pick, pack, ship, receive, reorder, and move goods at will. This is a huge time saver, which lets your warehouse workers get more done and avoid typos and other errors that often arise through manual data entry. Fishbowl Go limits the number of workers required to get the job done in the warehouse.
4. Get a Virtual On-Site Training Session
If you’re just getting started with Fishbowl Manufacturing or Fishbowl Warehouse, you don’t have to wait for an implementer to come to your facility to train you and your staff on how to use it. They can do that remotely through virtual on-site training sessions. You just need to have access to a mobile device with a camera to let the implementer tour your facilities and tailor their training to your specific needs. They can even help you organize your inventory data into spreadsheets and import them into Fishbowl.
5. Minimize Touch Points During the Order Management Process
As mentioned above, Fishbowl Go helps you perform complex inventory, warehouse, and order management tasks. When shipments arrive at your warehouse, your workers are able to scan in goods, reconcile sales orders if there are discrepancies, and receive everything with the aid of a barcode scanner. And when the time comes to pick items to fulfill sales orders, they can perform batch picks to save time and avoid having to retrace their steps through the warehouse. They simply collect all the goods they need for multiple orders in one pass. This minimizes touch points and keeps your operations running smoothly.
6. Use an Online Employee Time Clock Solution
Fishbowl Time is an online time clock solution that lets your workers sign in and out using a barcode, PIN, or other means without having to be physically present in an office, warehouse, or other business location. As a manager, you can track where they logged in from, how long they worked on specific projects, and other data points that help with making strategic labor decisions. Plus, you can schedule PTO hours, manage payrolls, calculate taxes, and do other things to take care of your workers.
7. Integrate Your Other Business Solutions with Fishbowl
Double data entry is a waste of time and an unnecessary risk. If you have to enter the same numbers into your inventory management, accounting, and CRM solutions, you could easily run into discrepancies when a mistake finds its way into just one of them. Integrate Fishbowl with QuickBooks, Salesforce, Magento, and many other business solutions to automatically update each of them shortly after you make a change to one. Fishbowl has dozens of integrations.
8. Set Up Automatic Reorder Points
Rather than guessing your inventory quantities or having to send out warehouse workers to constantly check what’s low, you can simply set up reorder points on every one of your parts and products to automatically order more of them when they fall below a certain threshold. You can use lead time, safety stock, and other calculations to make sure the purchase orders have the right quantities and vendors before you issue them.
9. Take Advantage of Fishbowl’s Extensive Reporting Capabilities
Fishbowl has more than 100 reports that allow you to study sales trends, plan ahead for sudden changes in demand, monitor vendor performance, print product labels and barcodes, and study customer buying habits. And that’s just scratching the surface of these reports. You can even get a custom report from Fishbowl’s Reports team to meet your specific needs.
10. Keep Your Inventory Records Accurate and Up to Date
You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble if you maintain accurate inventory records. That includes knowing what quantities you have in stock, at which warehouses, on what shelves, right down to the bin number. When you have all this information at your fingertips, it makes it much easier to make smart decisions about reordering, supply chains, storage, and more. Keep costs down and make the best use of your resources by using Fishbowl to keep your inventory levels balanced. In addition, our valued partner NETSTOCK explains more about supply/demand forecasting in their blog post: “An inventory planner’s dilemma post-coronavirus.”
Be Prepared
The coronavirus crisis won’t last forever and things will eventually improve. Be prepared for that big upswing, as well as future fluctuations in the market, by taking advantage of Fishbowl’s many business solutions today. Click here to learn more.
Robert Lockard is a copywriter with Fishbowl. He writes for several blogs about inventory management, manufacturing, QuickBooks, and small business. Fishbowl is the #1-requested manufacturing and warehouse management software for QuickBooks users. Robert enjoys running, reading, writing, spending time with his wife and children, and watching movies.
