Manual documentation of inventory is really a cliched task, isn’t it?
Who likes to note down all inventory-related data on paper and submit it to the inventory manager for approval?
Paying a handsome salary for just recording data is not a good idea either.
Additionally, you just can’t consider human efforts without considering human error, can you?
This traditional method of inventory management often leads to overstocking or stock outage scenarios, lost sales, unsatisfied customers, fewer profit margins, and many other things.
What Is Inventory Management?
The streamlined Inventory management process empowers organizations to have the right items on hand at the right time to meet customer demand while reducing cost and loss.
What are Types of Inventories?
Raw materials: It includes both perishable as well as nonperishable materials, from sand, wood or wool, electric parts, to raw fruits, vegetables, grains, or meats used to make processed foods.
Work in progress: These goods are items that are not yet ready to sell, like glass sheets, window frames, fabric, or flour.
Ready-to-sell Goods: They are nothing but ready-to-sell items, such as a window, suit coat, electric gadgets, loaf of bread, etc. Finished goods may be either intermediate items headed for another manufacturer, such as fabric to a clothing maker or bread to a sandwich shop, or a consumer good destined for a retailer or direct-to-consumer (D2C) sale.
Maintenance, Repair & Operations: These items are needed to keep the production line running. Few tools that come under this are tools or spare parts, or consumables to get products to their destinations, like paint or packaging.
Now that you understand what inventory management is, it’s time to dive deep into inventory management software.
What is Inventory Management Software?
It provides staff members with complete visibility over inventory management with a mobile app and automates your inventory management workflow. Moreover, they also get the functionality of notifications when your inventory reaches the threshold limit.
6 Key Inventory Management Trends To Watch in 2022
1. The Advent of Cloud-based Inventory Management Software
2. The Increasing Demand for Barcode Scanning Systems
3. Burgeoning Focus Towards Order Management
Over the past few years, order management has undergone a major transformation to accommodate process re-engineering in inventory management systems.
4. Growing Preference Towards Business Process Automation
5. The Introduction of Advanced Inventory Reporting & Analytics
Organizations across the world have started using real-time data analytics for inventory management to make better business decisions, develop a more customer-centric business model and reduce costs along with improving efficiency.
- Collect data even if you’re not sure how you’ll use it now. Use mobile phones for data collection, add photos, annotations, or anything that comes while managing inventory. The more inputs you provide, the more accurate your eventual predictive analytics and reporting become.
- Opt for software that has integration capabilities. Look for systems that can interconnect with your finance and accounting, ERP, order and customer management, and other core software.
- All decisions should be based on data, with reports to back up assertions. Select the metrics, like logistics KPIs or supply chain KPIs, that matter to your company, and track them consistently.
All product companies can benefit from a deep dive into inventory management and controls. - Take actions based on insights discovered. Teams that work to analyze data and issue reports but never see any movement based on their efforts will become discouraged. For manufacturers, even data analytics can reveal suppliers that often fall short on quality or timeliness, production bottlenecks or inefficient warehouse layouts. Add some machine learning and you can start taking predictive actions.
6. The Advent of Cutting-edge Technologies for Predictive picking
Enhance Your Inventory Management System With Axonator!
I’m sure I have cleared out how important digital inventory management can be for an organization.
And to streamline and even grow operations, inventory managers need to increase their skill sets and gain new data analytics and forecasting capabilities.
That’s where Axonator, the no-code platform comes in.
Axonator helps you amass and analyze data so that you can embrace current trends, keep your profit margins strong and maintain a high level of service for your customers.
No matter what the circumstances are, Axonator can make your inventory management work better. Make your employees productive and provide customers with what they need, when they need it.
- With Axonator inventory management software you can efficiently automate inventory management operations to avoid stock outages and overstock scenarios.
- You can track existing inventory levels, orders, sales, deliveries, bills of materials, and other inventory-related documents in less than one minute.
- Its cutting-edge features like barcode scanning systems, geo-tagging capabilities, business insights, report generation, etc. help businesses automate complex inventory management processes and solve all inventory management-related challenges.
