Inventory Management Made Easy with ERP
Inventory management is a critical process for any business that sells or manufactures products. If your focus is customer satisfaction, it’s all the more important. Poor inventory management can harm your business in multiple ways. Manual or legacy inventory management systems with rigid or limited data functionality are likely to impede your ability to fulfil inventory and delivery requirements. Using spreadsheets and disparate systems can give rise to a number of errors, data duplication and so on, further giving rise to issues in your supply chain. Additionally, as your business expands, you are likely to need multiple warehouses to maintain inventory for your multiple manufacturing or trading sites, and this can become very difficult without the right software.
ERP to the Rescue
Enterprise Resource Planning is a comprehensive software that brings all your departments or business processes into a single space, eliminating data silos and various legacy systems. This ensures centralized data with no redundancy. It is secure, providing access to employees to only that part of the information that is required for them to execute their functions. ERP systems help improve accuracy, eliminate errors, save time and cost, and improve efficiency and productivity across your company. It gives every department complete visibility into inventory information and enables them to make informed decisions regarding inventory procurement, reorder and so on, to ensure swift order fulfilment, eliminate stock outs, and reduce carrying costs.
ERP solutions can be used by any type of business – trading or manufacturing; small, medium and multinational corporations; pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, educational institutions, banks, construction companies, retail businesses, and more. ERP systems help companies be more organized and efficient.
What are the Inventory Management Challenges?
The most common challenge in inventory management is not having the right quantity of inventory – either too much inventory and high holding costs, or not having sufficient quantity and losing sales.
Lack of accurate stock details: not having the complete details means not knowing when to reorder and what to reorder.
Poor processes – legacy or manual processes can make the process slow and lead to errors
Fluctuating customer demand – customer preferences and requirements are subject to constant change. Without tracking customer demand trends, you will not know when customer preferences change, and won’t be able to order the right inventory.
The demand may change due to new technology, seasons, or economic factors. This holds true for pharmaceutical, retail, financial, and other businesses.
Proper use of warehouse space – when you don’t know where each product is stored, you are likely to waste a lot of time searching and locating products. Without a proper system to store, you may waste a lot of space and then find you have no space left to store incoming products.
How Does ERP Help Improve Inventory Management?
With a reliable ERP system, you can automate inventory management and improve your ability to understand emerging trends, forecast future trends, organize your inventory better, decrease shipping time, reduce costs, fulfil orders swiftly, and ensure customer satisfaction.
Track Inventory in Real Time
An ERP inventory management solution helps you track inventory in real tome so that your current inventory information is updated to match the actual inventory. This means whenever fresh inventory comes in or inventory goes out of the warehouse or store for shipping to the customer, the inventory data is automatically refreshed – increased or decreased. Without real-time inventory tracking, employees usually wait till the data can be batch loaded, putting the inventory data in your records out of sync with the actual inventory in hand until the batch loading of data is completed. The greater number of inventory locations you have, the more complicated the problems become without proper ERP systems in place. With ERP inventory management systems, you can reduce stockouts and obsolescence, and minimize returns. You can significantly improve the accuracy of order fulfilment and deliver in time. It also gives you improved visibility into your inventory, increasing the accuracy of forecast demand and other KPIs.
Automate Workflows
ERP systems bring in automation, which means that your employees are freed from mundane manual tasks and can focus on boosting accuracy, enhancing productivity, and delivering improved customer service. With automation, you can decrease data redundancy, excess or too little inventory, dead stock, and so on. Reduced data redundancy can cause inconsistent data, corrupted data, and higher storage expenses. Workflows like incoming and outgoing transfers can be streamlines, as also processes like bin tracking and label printing. ERP automation ensures that you reorder the right quantity of the right product at the right time, and that you replace obsolete or expired products with fresh or newer versions. By automating routing inventory across multiple locations, you can save time, bring down shipping costs, and ensure swift order fulfilment.
Enhance Accuracy of Demand Forecasting
Accurate forecasting is most important for manufacturing companies, but it is also important for other industries like pharmaceutical companies. For example, when you stay abreast of disease outbreaks, you can forecast the medicines that will be required for the immediate future; same way, you can forecast medicines required for seasonal illnesses like the flu. The major indicators for forecasts include past orders, purchase behavior, promotions, economic factors, and so on. Accurately forecasting demand can help in reducing costs and enhancing your inventory management. Reliable ERP systems like Innsof can help you analyze supply and demand requirements and give you valuable insights to make the right decisions.
Setup and Manage SKU’s Efficiently
SKUs are Stock Keeping Units, and they are product codes used to locate and identify stock from lists, invoices, delivery notes, orders, etc. SKUs are invaluable in differentiating between similar products, helping you monitor stock availability, types and location of the product, margins, profitability, selling prices, inventory loss, and more. If you have used or are still using manual spreadsheets or legacy software to manage SKUs, you would be well aware of the complexity and difficulty of naming SKUs and maintaining them. Modern inventory systems like Innsof have inbuilt naming systems that avoid manual tasks, and also allow easy barcode scanning, making your inventory process even more efficient.
What are the Features to Look for in an ERP Inventory Management System?
An efficient ERP inventory management system must firstly be capable of customization to meet the changing requirements of your organization. It should be flexible, and should offer the choice of deployment on the cloud or on premises as per your requirements. Here are some of the features that you should get when you’re shopping for an inventory management system:
Accuracy – your ERP solutions should be able to provide accurate records of inventory with quick access to detailed inventory data, including transactions, analysis, customizable cycle counts, and more.
Real-time Tracking on the go – ideally, your ERP should allow you to track and manage your inventory in real time, no matter where you are, and at any time, via a mobile device, whether you have a single or multiple locations.
Supply chain management – a modern inventory management solution should include supply chain management feature, as it can help you study requirements of supply and demand. This will help you make informed decisions to improve forecasting and increase inventory turns.
Automation – your business requirements are subject to constant change; automation allows you to adapt to those changes swiftly. A reliable ERP will enable you to define custom inventory workflows to align with your business needs.
Tracking and tracing – it is important to get complete tracing, with lot and serial number, batch tracking, expiry tracking, and so on. This will help you locate items close to expiry and also be useful during audits.
Customer management – an efficient ERP system should help you manage your customer details accurately. Knowing what they like and what they don’t, lead times, and other factors will help you provide more customized offerings and marketing messages to your customers and serve them better. You will be able to fulfil orders faster and ensure customer satisfaction.
Vendor management – to manage inventory efficiently, you need to build good relationships with your suppliers. Innsof ERP helps you maintain in-depth details of vendors including contact information, lead time, accuracy of order fulfilment, quality of products, and more.
Final Thoughts
Inventory is the lifeblood of a trading firm or company, and hence, it is absolutely essential that you manage it efficiently. Manual methods can be messy, and legacy systems can lead to inefficiencies and inaccuracies. These can cause a lot of harm to your business and your reputation.
Innsof has specialized ERP solutions for pharmacies called Innsof Pharma, and for clinics, called Innsof Medcare. As a leading technology expert with industry experience, Innsof has built the most effective and comprehensive healthcare ERP solutions.
We have successfully implemented comprehensive business solutions to a number of pharmacies and medical centers or clinics, helping them boost productivity and efficiency while reducing cost and effort. Our healthcare business solutions are feature-packed and economically priced.
Contact us today to know more!