Managing sudden fluctuations from vendors or customers becomes challenging for growing businesses. If not managed properly, this can impact on the overall customer experience and, in the end, business growth and scalability. However, implementing Inventory Management software can help overcome these challenges.
Moreover, if you have multiple warehouses, optimizing inventory levels in each warehouse, managing inventory transfer, and ensuring inventory adjustment could be a cumbersome process.
Thus, growing businesses continuously adapt Inventory Management systems to optimize inventory levels, streamline multi-warehousing, and increase customer satisfaction.
To support the above statement, Grand View Research reveals- “The inventory management software market size was recorded USD 3.43 billion in 2023 which is further projected to grow at a CAGR of 6.74% for the period 2024 to 2030.”
With this market overview, now navigating through an end-to-end guide to Inventory Management comprising the overview, benefits, and techniques helping businesses to optimize their inventory levels, simplify warehousing operations, and stimulate customer delivery.
A Guide to Inventory Management
What is Inventory Management?
Inventory Management is all about planning for seamless inventory flow from purchasing and storing to selling inventory items or stock. It ensures that the right inventory stock with the right volume is available, and no excess stock is lying in the warehouse.
Advantages of Inventory Management
Seamless inventory management is the key to success for the businesses that deal with products. Lacking product tracking can lead to inefficient stock levels and a dissatisfactory customer experience. Here are the potential advantages of effective inventory management:
Ensure inventory accuracy
Inventory management helps you stay updated with current stock availability and you order only the required inventory counts to meet the demand.
Reduced risk of overselling
Having a proper inventory management system in place can help you reduce the risk of overselling as it helps keep you updated with what’s in stock across your warehouses and what’s on backorder.
Save costs
When your products don't sell and lie for a long time in your warehouse, it costs. Carrying costs include storage, handling, transportation, and salary of warehouse workforce. Inventory may also have expiry dates, risk of theft, natural disasters, etc. Inventory management solution helps save costs by overcoming these all.
Aligning with the right inventory levels
An inventory management system can help you identify which inventory items to restock more and which inventory items to restock less in quantity ensuring seamless stock availability across your warehouse(s).
Real-time actionable insights
With the help of an inventory tracking and stock control system, you can easily access sales trends, identify product recalls, and stay updated with the product range near expiry. With these insights, your warehousing team can make quick and effective decisions eliminating inventory waste and saving costs.
Increase efficiency
An adequate inventory or multi-warehouse management system helps streamline the inventory flow, bring effective tracking, and simplify the multi-warehousing process. This in turn helps increase overall efficiency across your warehouse and distribution.
Greater terms with vendors/suppliers
Inventory management helps you with the insights revealing which product sells faster and in maximum volume. With these insights, you can even negotiate better prices and ensure better terms with your vendors or suppliers.
Streamlined multi-warehousing
Knowing which inventory items are in demand and are often sold together can help you organize your warehouse accordingly. This can help minimize costs and faster order fulfillment.
Improved customer experience
Having solutions for inventory optimization can help ensure the right stock availability, stimulate the pick-pack-ship process, and lead to timely delivery to the customers. This in turn helps generate customer trust and loyalty.
Benefits of Inventory Management Software When Integrated with ERP
Inventory management software can help you maintain the right stock levels across your warehouses and save costs. Once inventory management software is integrated with the ERP system, you can have more benefits exhibited below:
Know the exact inventory flow
A cloud-based ERP system comprising an inventory management solution can empower you with centralized data across orders from sales to accounting and fulfillment to service. This centralized data view helps eliminate duplication and enables seamless stock replenishment.
By implementing the LionO360 ERP solution, you can stay updated with the exact inventory available on the shelf, inventory counts in the pick-pack-ship process, and inventory in the supply chain for customer delivery. You can also ensure effective inventory tracing post-customer delivery ensuring seamless product recall.
Automate manual/repetitive tasks
Automation in processes can help speed up put-away and order fulfillment processes using an ERP system integrated with an inventory management solution. Yes, it can help automate pick-pack process and product scanning through barcodes, etc.,
An effective serial number management facilitation in the system can help you track and trace the product life cycle from product receiving and storing in the warehouse to order fulfillment and product recall management.
Effective multi-warehouse management
Growing businesses often manage multiple warehouses in different locations to ensure seamless and faster order fulfillment. ERP system with inventory management capability helps you streamline the inventory transfer and inventory adjustment when an order is placed for a different warehouse and is fulfilled from a different warehouse.
In the LionO360 system, we offer a seamless multi-warehousing solution that helps effectively manage order fulfillment through centralized data. Our system allows seamless inventory adjustment and inventory transfer to ensure seamless order fulfillment and effective product recall.
Make data-driven decisions
ERP software can provide inventory flow analytics and actionable insights enabling you to make data-driven stock decisions. Further, this can help reduce inventory carrying and handling costs.
In the LionO360 ERP system, you cannot merely get regular stock analytics, you get customized insights. Yes, you heard right, we offer Saved Searches functionality that allows you to generate customized reports by leveraging the inventory data. This helps you quickly make more data-driven decisions.
Gain improved forecasting
ERP system leverages the inventory data and can provide insights in real-time. These insights can be used to forecast stocks and ensure seamless inventory optimization saving costs. Further, these insights can also help simplify your supply chain and distribution process.
Using the LionO360 system, you can get customized insights into inventory helping you to make instant decisions. This can help you forecast and predict the future demand of your customers.
Our system also enables you with inventory planning to determine the inventory optimization needs from tracking the stock levels to replenishment and tracing the product for service or support purposes.
Saves costs with inventory optimization
The Inventory optimization solution when integrated with ERP software lets you enjoy increased efficiency through automation, and improved workforce productivity through enriched functional capabilities such as Serial Number Management, Lot No. etc., and uninterrupted workflow through data-driven decisions.
Eventually, all such capabilities help reduce the overall costs including operational, stock handling, distribution, and service. All you need to do is contact our experts to understand how LionLO360 ERP can help you reduce your costs.
Effectively manage product recalls
Tracing capability through serial number management in the inventory management solution helps simplify the product recall process. This in turn can help level up your customer experience and earn their trust in the long run.
Using LionO360 ERP, you can ensure effective product tracking post-sales. Now, let’s understand how it works. Our system automatically assigns a serial number to each product associated with a specific Lot number. Now, these products can be traced either to process effective customer returns or ensure streamlined product recall purposes.
For instance, when a customer raises the return, using the serial number, it can be easily identified from which Lot number it belongs along with location and date.
Moreover, when you find quality issues, product defects, or safety concerns about a specific product (associated with a specific Lot) post-delivery to the customers, you can easily ensure product recall. All you need to do is trace the products using serial numbers eliminating the difficulty of identifying the product range.
How to Choose the Right Inventory Management software?
Having the right inventory management system in place can bring effectiveness and ensure desired results. Here are key steps to be followed while choosing the right inventory management software:
Analyze your business needs
Before you come up with the inventory management software, understand your business needs first. Understand your current operations and evaluate your futuristic scalability. Identify involved challenges and opportunities that you need to align with. This will help you choose software that can align with your goals.
If you want us to analyze your business needs, we can ensure end-to-end evaluation and implement the solution suited to your specific business requirements and future goals.
Define your inventory management issues
Evaluate and come up with the exact inventory management issues that your business is currently facing and seeking to overcome. For instance, are you dealing with overstock/understock issues, inaccurate tracking/tracing, or inefficient multi-warehousing operations? Once you define your issues precisely, you can seek a tailored solution for your business.
Know who is going to use the software
It is important to identify the users who are going to use the inventory management system. They could be warehousing staff, warehouse manager, service team/support team, etc. Considering their roles and technical proficiency, you can choose the software that is accessible to all of them, user-friendly, and personalized.
Look for essential features
Considering your core requirements and future scalability, focusing on must-have features is inevitable. These features might include tracking/tracing in real-time, serial number management, aisle rack bin management, purchase order & bill management, barcode scanning, analytics, customized reports, etc.
All you need to evaluate and choose features to support your ongoing and futuristic business needs. At LionOBytes, we can analyze your business needs and tailor the solution accordingly.
With the LionO360 ERP system, you can leverage inventory management capabilities such as serial number-based inventory tracking/tracing in real-time, product recall management, multi-warehousing, barcode scanning, custom reports & analytics, etc.
To know your personalized inventory management solution, connect with our expert team or schedule a free demo. This will help you understand how the LionO360 ERP solution could be a proven milestone for your inventory management needs.
Compatibility to integrate with other systems
It is also crucial to ensure that the inventory management solution you choose should be integrated with your existing system. This will eliminate the need to switch between systems, thus improving the efficiency level.
When it comes to the LionO360 system, we provide ERP software equipped with an end-to-end inventory management solution. We ensure secure, seamless, and compatible integration with almost all third-party tools and applications.
Check software scalability
For your continuously growing business, it is vital to choose software that can be scaled when your functionality requirement grows so that you will pay for what you get for now and can ask to scale the solution whenever required to meet your futuristic needs.
Ensure the right implementation partner
To ensure a seamless transition, partnering with the right ERP implementation vendor is essential. Look for an ERP provider that has a proven team of experts to implement a personalized inventory management solution for your business.
Make sure that they have an understanding or experience in implementing a solution for your specific industry. Moreover, consider the support part as an essential deal. Ask them whether they will provide ongoing training to your users and post-deployment support.
Leverage the Benefits of Inventory Management with LionO360!
LionOBytes provides a business-empowering ERP system equipped with an inventory management solution. It comes with comprehensive features to ensure inventory optimization, real-time product tracking/tracing, analytics for informed decision-making, and multi-warehousing capability to optimize stock across warehouses.
If you want to leverage the benefits of Inventory Management with LionO360, we are here to connect and schedule your free product demo with our experts.
For more information call us at +1 609-281-5272
Frequently Asked Questions
How can growing businesses benefit from Inventory Management Software?
Growing businesses can automate processes, eliminate manual errors, and gain access to real-time inventory levels throughout the process cycle. This can help businesses achieve efficiency throughout the inventory management process and improve decision-making.
Can Inventory Management software impact customer satisfaction?
Yes, Inventory management software helps automate your processes, centralize data to support real-time decision-making, and enables you to manage inventory levels across your warehouses.
This in turn helps stimulate customer delivery, ensure seamless returns & refunds, and drive effective customer service. Thus, Inventory Management Software helps improve customer satisfaction.
Can effective Inventory Management enhance profitability?
Yes, effective inventory management helps optimize inventory levels, prevent over-stocking/stock-outs, minimize costs, and increase customer experience which eventually contributes to enhanced profitability.