Going from a startup company that operates primarily on Excel spreadsheets to a fully functional small to medium sized company with the ability to adapt to growth requires tools designed for scalability.
If you make, buy, or sell products, your business handles inventory to some degree and setting up a system to track it at all stages gives your company valuable feedback to understand sales, profits, inventory quantities, the success or failure of certain products and where you can make improvements. If you’re attempting to do all these things with custom spreadsheets from different departments, your data may not match up and discrepancies can worsen over time.
Software can empower your business by integrating the information contained within every department’s spreadsheet while making the same information available to everyone across the company. When data from floor production matches up with the finance department, you no longer have people trying to track down missing inventory or costs. Everything makes sense because everything is accounted for.
Some great features inventory software can bring to the table include:
- Traceability – the ability to perform a backwards or forwards trace to locate a product anywhere in its journey. This is especially important when working with any type of perishable product.
- Serial Tracking – Keeping track of a product after a sale is necessary when that product comes with a warranty. Serial tracking assigns a specific number to every product so that a specific product can be associated with a warranty belonging to a particular customer. Then when that product requires repair according to the warranty, the manufacturer can access the information associated with that product.
- Automation – One way you can streamline repetitive tasks is by setting up reorder points for your products based on minimum quantities you determine based on demand, lead time and time in production. If you order more product whenever you reach these minimum amounts, you ensure production will not stop and that you have product coming in on time to replace that which has already been consumed.
- ERP Functionality – Some, not all, inventory software will allow you to integrate different departmental information together so your sales department, production floor, fulfillment, finance, etc. are all working from the same data set. If every department has access to the information they need to make decisions without relying on feedback from another department, they can all work more efficiently.
- Perpetual inventory method – If you want to keep your inventory counts and costs update from every access point, implementing a perpetual inventory method is key. When product is received and logged, inventory counts, and costs are updated across the software platform. The same goes for products used in production, finished products ready to sell, and items sold as orders are received.
Being a startup company is difficult when the economy is strong; surviving the ups and downs of high inflation, rising costs, increasing regulations and supply chain disruptions put you at a disadvantage. To give your company a chance to keep up with competition while overcoming all these obstacles, you really need to take advantage of the abilities software tracking offers to your team.