4 ways most Inventory Management Systems
What is Inventory Management System?
Investopedia defines Inventory Management
“Inventory management system refers to the process of ordering, storing, and using a company’s inventory. This includes the management of raw materials, components, and finished products, as well as warehousing and processing such items.”
More than 50% times inventory data is wrong.
This is a hard fact that companies have to deal with and even suffer losses in terms of money and reputation. We will see some cases where the probability of making an error is more so that we cover these specific points while deploying a system for inventory management.
1. Item classification:
If we keep store items in a standard way with equal weightage to all then there arises a problem of overstock or stockout because some items are more critical than others. So, the system should assign a weight and divide the items into three categories- Most critical, Lesser critical, and least critical. Most critical items should be put into tight inventory control and frequent reviews. Lesser critical and least critical require proportionately lighter inventory controls and review. In this way, we can equip our system with the most practical and logical way of classifying items while receiving.
2. Demand Forecasting:
It is used to determine the number of items that will be required in maintenance operations in the near future. Advanced inventory management system should be smart enough to incorporate quantitative forecasting. Some examples of quantitative forecasting methods include last-period demand and simple and weighted moving averages. Each of these methods uses past data in different types of mathematical formulas to determine how many items will be required in the future. The forecasting accuracy can be measured using forecasting errors defined as the difference between actual demand quantity and the forecasted demand.
3. Replenishment methods:
The technology-enabled inventory management will reduce the time between stock out and reorder. Since we are able to apply the threshold rule on the software to get the alerts as soon the lower level of quantity is touched, it becomes easier to handle and that too in an error-free way.
The system is responsible for ordering and receiving of goods: timing the order placement and keeping track of what has been ordered, how much, and from whom.
4. Data analysis:
It is of great advantage in today’s age of data and information to just not sit on the past data but use it to extract some trends or intelligence out of it. E.g the information like 18.52% of inventory didn’t have any movement in the current year till date or 3.45% of total inventory lost their quantity due to expiry. Also, we can find out the quantity of certain items is too high than their demand thus adding to holding-cost or there were two instances of stockout in a certain item. This kind of inputs shall definitely help the management to reduce cost and be ready for variations.
Moving towards better Inventory Management System
The inventory management system can improve the company’s inventory control existing situation and decrease costs of the company. The automation of this process can support several forecasting methods and it reacts to changes in the environment.
September 9, 2022 at 9:36 am |
Inventory management efficiency is an important factor for any manufacturing industries and optimizing it further for the improvements results in business growth. Thanks for sharing the informative article.