Does not knowing what you have in stock give you anxiety? For more reason than your mental health, it’s important to keep track of your inventory. If you have too much, you’ll have to find ways to offload unused stock which might include selling yourself short. 

If you have too little, you aren’t providing your customers with what they need when they need it, and they go somewhere else unless you make costly, rushed decisions to make the sale.

As we talk to our warehouse customers, we hear their #1 priority continues to be accuracy and visibility. When hiring more people, establishing functional organizational workflows, or investing in more technologies to grow the business, companies temporarily lose some level of accuracy and visibility across the entire footprint. 

But how else will you grow? These technology, people, and processes investments are vital for growth, even when introducing complexities that can be seen as brief setbacks.

Our warehouse managers have it right. It all comes down to accuracy and real-time visibility in the warehouse. Poor inventory management is the not-so-hidden efficiency killer when most of the issues warehouse staff deal with daily originate from inventory discrepancies.

Ways Inventory Inaccuracies Kill Warehouse Efficiency

If a significant number of your inventory balances are inaccurate, it will reflect throughout your operation. Without real-time visibility for accurate stock levels, you run into:

• Sales teams having to reach the warehouse to check stock
• The wrong product or wrong location used in shipping
• Inaccurate stock data leading to missed or canceled sales
• Reduced customer trust when they expect a product, but you ran out
• Increased rush orders and shipping for non-stock items when you had the product all along but without accurate tracking.
• Too much time spent locating missing or misplaced products

What is inventory management?

Reliably, accurately, and visibly tracking and controlling your warehouse’s stock is inventory management. One of the most crucial elements of inventory management is knowing exactly where inventory is at all times. Manual and/or piecemeal inventory management systems often struggle with tracking the movement and locations of materials in the business when those materials change departments and as the tracking for those materials then changes hands from one responsible party to another.

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Warehouse automation software makes inventory management processes so much easier by increasing your warehouse efficiency and reducing your product stock to only what’s needed. 

Successful inventory management improves customer relationships while avoiding overstock–and takes the anxiety out of knowing what you have on hand. 

Better, More Accurate Inventory with Warehouse Automation

The warehouse needs accurate, real-time inventory tracking with full reporting that includes inventory status, support allocation by lot and serial number in order to track guarantees and provide complete pricing to the sales department. 

Enterprise resource planning makes accurate inventory possible by enabling scanned material coming into and out of locations through a real-time cycle inventory program that reduces inventory errors and tracks down the source of mistakes when they do occur.

With an organized inventory management system ERP like Sage 100, you can finally control costs while positioning your leadership to make informed business decisions from real-time inventory visibility. With automated purchasing, you can make better and more timely purchasing decisions from record order histories that allow you to restock your inventory automatically.

Sage 100 gives you access to accurate and real-time visibility into all of your inventory processes for true warehouse automation. Quickly and accurately track goods, their movement between locations, and the receipt, sale, removal, or other disposition of goods status. You can also determine each product’s precise value in seconds.

By providing this level of precise inventory control and safeguarding, Sage 100 Inventory Management becomes the foundation of your warehouse operations with access to comprehensive inventory reporting.

Inventory Visibility: Through AI and ML, warehouse staff can better predict demand and adjust inventory ahead of demand.   

Supply Prediction: AI and ML allow companies to better predict when supplies will arrive to prepare for shortages.

Resiliency: AI and ML give companies the flexibility to adapt and overcome issues that affect shipping and receiving materials on time.

Companies increasingly use ERP systems for accounting needs

ERP is a natural fit for distributors because of its inventory management and logistics management tools, but among the primary benefits of an ERP system are its accounting capabilities. More and more businesses across all sectors that use ERP are coming around to its accounting integrations, and distributors will follow suit.

Sage 100 for Accounting and Warehouse Automation

When you choose Sage 100cloud, you increase inventory accuracy, complete and ship orders on time – all while adding more customers and growing margins without increasing IT infrastructure or your anxiety level. 

e2b teknologies is a Sage Authorized partner. We customize, implement, and support Sage 100 ERP software for a wide range of distributor and manufacturing operations. The sooner your business adapts to the new normal of cloud-computing, the further ahead of the competition you’ll find yourself. 

Are you ready to make better, more informed business decisions with Sage 100? Find out how we can take you to peak performance on the warehouse floor, in the accounting department, and across your entire footprint.