How do you make inventory control sustainable?

The value of a product is a lot greater than the cost of goods. Be careful to factor in enough margin to cover off marketing, logistics, and handling customers enquiries and then create a profit. Creating visibility of all the moving parts early on will significantly improve you you decision making. Understand your customers at every opportunity. This is the best way to predict future demand.

I've proved over and over that analysing your stock movement and coming up with set replenishment levels puts you in control. Preferably having the levels at max 50% and min 30%. This has proven also to be an effective cost control measure inline with cashflow management. The cycle counts keeps you on top of things.

Two simple inventory control practices that will keep your business under control: 1. Cycle Count. It will help with repeated deviations during a short time period. 2. MIN/MAX. Reviewing your inventory replenishing levels is also important to save money. Put both in practice and the results will help you.

Quality assurance is critical. Avoid obsolete, expired, and substandard goods in order to keep the integrity of your inventory. Also FIFO and in some cases LIFO should be practiced.

Besides those questions, it is also important to check when the last W2W inventory was made and how often this kind of inventories are made within the company. If no W2W has made in a year, it is time to make one. The other important thing is to see what is the cycle count policy implemented and what is its outcome. This can show how us in a quick view how health the inventory is and what kind of changes we have to make in the warehouse to improve it.

Cycle counting is a must! It should revolve around a designated rotation of A, B and C level items at least a few times per week. However, in a manufacturing setting, daily verification of items shipped, items received and items produced per a BOM, will help alleviate the strenuous task of cycle counting every day.

In a retail setting optimize any processes that is currently wasting labor and causing you inventory inaccuracies. Focus first on incoming/outgoing processes (receiving and sales). Most are not fool proof so make sure you have a way to audit then add cycle counting only where needed (high theft items, high damage) Too much cycle counting and you can inadvertently cause inaccuracies. Have checks and balances in place to understand the cause of an inaccurate number. Inventory is money, whether it's physically in front of you or a number on paper. Ensure anyone who touches your inventory understands that. Managing your inventory levels to only what you need before the next order arrives will allow you to better optimize your processes.

Demand planning is both an art and a science. Toilet roll for example, never fear running out. Fashion however, have confidence, have it available at launch and get your reading on how much demand there can be at the beginning. JIT relies heavily on capacity planning and developing relationships with suppliers to flex supply. Treat you suppliers like business partners and go beyond sharing data - use data to collaboratively plan with.

Consumers deserve better and our desire to support the planet with our purchasing habits is rising up the agenda and we are looking for businesses to help us do this. A healthy supply chain is something to shout about in your marketing. Initiatives like the Green Code are here to help regulate and ensure that as consumers we are not mislead with green washing. Creating visibility of you supply chain has never been so easy. Modern technology allows us to keep all the required records with ease. It just needs a little thought and tender loving care to adopt these record keeping processes into working collaborations.

Collaboration and sharing: Explore collaborations with other businesses or organizations to share resources and reduce individual inventory levels. Sharing storage facilities or pooling inventory can lead to decreased waste and increased efficiency. Continuous improvement: Regularly review and analyze inventory data, performance metrics, and sustainability goals. Seek feedback from employees, suppliers, and customers to identify areas for improvement and implement necessary changes.

There are many metrics and setting up a manageable way to use them and stay informed is the key to inventory management. Ensuring that the right information cascades to the right people to make decisions is where information design is a mega force. If you are working with a large inventory, you will want to automate some decisions so that you are only looking at the priorities and exceptions so that you hard work in planning phase looks after its self in terms of sell through. Get close to these three: What stock is working harder for you business that you anticipated, keep it in stock. What stock is not working as hard for you business as you had planned, de-risk this stock. What seasonal factors do I need to build into the outlook.

In my experience the tremendous amount of resource and effort that needs to do regular/ effective inventory management is a big challenge a business face. Implementing a strict lean methodology will help to control along with IOT in scope for inventory management will save cost and improve efficiency. Very strict control in inbound and outbound is required for an optimal outcome! Biggest challenge will be the resistance to change and reliability of IT infrastructure!

Inventory Management in the Retail arm of the Oil & Gas industry is expectedly mercurial in my part of the world given the changing demands all year round amidst the additional pressures of ensuring energy security and a sane environment too easily rendered chaotic by price changes. However, with the recent subsidy removal in the industry, actual market forces appear to be gain traction while the economy is undergoing its expected plunge prior to stabilising. The result is a different climate that is yet to be transposable with historical data as we have known it to be. For us, at this time, inventory management requires a whole new perspective and a preparedness to ensure that we do not try to fit our new reality in what has been.

When I started as Supply Chain Manager for a medical company, I realized that no W2W inventory was made in the last two years. Of course the discrepances were high. We had a lot of complaints about our inventory. Because of this, I had to schedule a W2W inventory as soon as possible to revert that situation.

One thing I add to Cycle Counts is to do a review of your Empty Bins. Doesn't matter the quantity, just check your empties for items not moved there. If you find items, cycle count that item and move missing product to that bin. Knowing where.producr is located correctly is half the battle.

Inventory control is as effective as the company's willingness to abide by best practices. For example, my team conducts a cycle count in a stock room but a week later the count of a few items, in a few rooms, is off by a reasonable amount. Whether the items are still there but missing from the report, or the items are gone but the report shows they are present. The root of the problem is the production foremen are not issuing materials to the jobs correctly. This devalues inventory efforts because it wastes time looking for items that were used or recounting items to get the same count.