What are some things that are standing in the way of better wholesale inventory management inside your distribution company?

To get the right answer, you need a critical eye and a strategic approach to addressing the needs of your business. Ask yourself:

How much of your inventory management process is handled manually?
you easily calculate your inventory turnover ratios?
What is the ripple effect of inaccurate inventory levels throughout your organization?
An unpredictable inventory management process leads to increased labor costs and decreased customer satisfaction due to inventory errors.

The right wholesale inventory management software, on the other hand, changes the way your organization operates. It’s a change that raises wholesale distribution companies to a new level of competitiveness.

Key Benefits From The Right Wholesale Inventory Management Software
Optimized Inventory Levels: Proper inventory planning satisfies both customers and executives. Executives don’t like seeing extra capital tied up or lost in unused or wasted inventory. Proper inventory planning depends on integration between sales orders, purchase orders and planning software to ensure real-time visibility into inventory levels for exceptional product fulfillment.

Stronger Supply Chain Visibility: Optimized inventory levels require more than front-office and back-office integration. They require information from suppliers and vendors, as well as from third-party logistics and your own in-house logistics team. This kind of synchronization satisfies both business management and customer relationship objectives.

Clearer, More Accurate Financial Reporting: Tax returns are where companies lose out if the proper inventory management software is not in place. Your financial integrity hinges on the link between back-office accounts and transactions listed in your inventory system. If the value of your inventory is a portion of your stated assets, what’s reported must match what’s inside your warehouse.

The areas above are where wholesale distribution companies experience the biggest software benefits. Other advantages include:

Supporting inventory costing models, including “last in, first out” and “first in, first out”
Maintaining real-time record of every purchase and paid invoice
Ensuring compatibility with multiple warehouses with varying inventory items
Delivering detailed inventory transaction reports from all sides: sales, customers and suppliers
The Path To Smarter Wholesale Inventory Management
If you always seem to have more inventory on hand than you need, that’s cash you could use elsewhere in your business. But if you carry too little product, you run the risk of disappointing customers by delaying orders. Manual reconciliations hold wholesale distribution companies back from effective planning and predictable execution. Real-time visibility into inventory levels increases your ability to make changes and meet customer demands.

A switch to industry-specific wholesale inventory management software is a switch to automation, and with automation comes decreased manual errors. Now, your warehouse pickers using bar codes scanners are able to automatically update inventory levels so that anyone in your company, at any time, is making decisions based on real, actionable data.

Having the right software in place means knowing more about your warehouse, and streamlined warehouse management leads to efficient use of space and accurate inventory levels.

The efficiency and accuracy improvements available to your business through the right wholesale inventory management software improve not only business operations, but also the value of your customer and vendor relationships.

By: Kat Wuethrich