What is Inventory Management?
Inventory management is the ongoing process of moving parts and products into and out of a company’s location(s). Companies manage their inventory on a daily basis as they place new orders for products and ship orders out to customers. It’s important that business leaders gain a firm grasp of everything involved in the inventory management process. That way, they can figure out creative ways to solve inventory management challenges by finding the right solutions.
Inventory Management Challenges
Without a doubt, inventory management is an important part of doing business. It is the means by which companies remain stocked with all of the essential goods they need to sell to customers and complete daily operations. When products are sold, they must be replenished at a rate that doesn’t lead to huge overstocks or frequent stock-outs. Successfully managing inventory means hitting a moving target because supply and demand aren’t constant, but they often change with the season and over the course of a product’s life-cycle. There’s also the problem of keeping track of inventory with different units of measure and suppliers in different countries with different tax rates and laws.
Inventory Management Attempts
To solve the challenge of proper inventory management, companies often turn to software that can help them keep track of all of their inventory, orders, vendors and more. Startups frequently record inventory quantities in Microsoft Excel because it’s easily accessible and they don’t have to put a lot of money into obtaining it. But they find that Excel lacks the nuanced and comprehensive features they need to analyze data, spot trends in sales and supply chains, automatically update inventory records from a barcode scanner, and keep their data secure yet accessible. Using a simple inventory management solution is a step up from Excel, but its limitations soon leads growing businesses to switch to a more advanced solution over time. This leads to wasted time and money spent learning a new system every few years.
Inventory Management Solutions
A better solution to inventory management is to find software that is affordable and robust enough for small and midsize businesses to stay with for many hours. It has features that are simple enough for a young business to master, but that can also be expanded to fit that same business’s increasingly complex needs year after year. Fishbowl is a powerful inventory management system that fits into this category. Fishbowl Manufacturing and Fishbowl Warehouse help you oversee multiple locations, track shipments, automatically reorder products, print and scan barcodes, convert units of measurement, use multi-currency features, create multilevel work orders, and much more. Fishbowl integrates with dozens of other business solutions, including Amazon, eBay, QuickBooks, Salesforce, and Xero, just to name a few. So you can share your inventory data across all of your other online and desktop platforms to ensure each one has accurate, up-to-date inventory quantities and values.
Inventory Management Usefulness
Fishbowl is an ideal inventory management solution for many types of businesses, including:
- Manufacturers that work with hundreds and even thousands of parts, components, and other materials.
- Wholesale distributors with multiple warehouses and suppliers both inside and outside their home country.
- Service providers that must maintain specific numbers of cleaning supplies, replacement parts, and other items to serve their customers.
- Food producers using ingredients that must be consumed before reaching certain expiration dates.
- Government agencies looking to track their assets across wide expanses and to serve a large number of people.
- And many others, ranging from SMBs to large organizations.