ERP: How to Optimize Stock Management in Your Company!

ERP-Enterprise Resource Planning is a useful and effective management tool for all organizations. It allows, among other features, to manage stocks efficiently and with simplicity.

Effective control, stock measurement and management help manufacturing and distribution companies to reduce investment costs. They also follow their evolution and monitor their needs.

It may seem simple to keep up to date the quantities of available products, but stock management can become a complex task for any company. This happens because different company departments may have divergent goals and opinions about how to deal better with the optimal level of stock, with the current suppliers and the future suppliers.

For example, sales departments can highlight optimistic numbers. Meanwhile, purchase teams can manage costs by getting quantity discounts. Besides that, business administrations usually prefer to reduce stock in warehouse. Consequently, by combining supply and demand flows, stock management can become a complex process.

Without good visibility and transparency, the management of supply orders, the interruptions in the supply chain, the availability of material, the products rupture and the customer orders can cause huge losses, as well as unused stock and acquire unnecessarily.

Let’s see how an ERP solution can help you optimizing your company’s stock management.

What can ERP software do for your company?

ERP systems help organizations to optimize stock investments by providing transparency of data registers. It also makes it possible to know how they are connected between the departments of the company. Organizations can monitor inventory performance and evaluate results and ERP software allows you to:

• Implement trackable processes such as expiration dates, units of measure, serial numbers, and batches;
• Add variables to the item forms, information about the location of the products in warehouse, storage requirements, fees to be applied in sales, special treatment and other important data;
• Keep control of the stock that is with reduce turnover or about to expire;
• Save an inventory list of products that, historically, have less profitability;
• Keep track of available and expected stock, giving customers updated and liable information about product availability;
• Guarantee that sales department follow products, to identify priority customers;
• Assign multiple suppliers to each product to eliminate gaps in availability;
• Identify indirect costs, materials, transportation freight and others, to obtain the actual costs of products.

7 ERP benefits to stock management:

1. Prevent unnecessary stock

An ERP system can help your organization avoid having excess stock, allowing better management and optimization in stock management and avoiding Bottlenecks. You can get accurate forecasts, by defining reliable delivery times with suppliers and increasing effectiveness in response. ERP allows continuous and real-time monitoring of the company inventory, suggesting placement of orders to avoid stock breaks.

2. Get better prices

By understanding the costs and margins, your company may have a clearer view of all related values and you can make a better deal with suppliers. With sales history always available to consult, the purchasing department manages to project and achieve more advantageous prices, based on real data.

3. Optimize Wharehouse

ERP software allows you to optimize the use of warehouse physical space, avoiding unnecessary investments in other facilities. Besides that, it’s a support to decide about stock rotation and purchase orders placing. It increases the capacity and organization of your warehouse. Knowing exactly how much stock you should maintain and when, it becomes easier to manage and optimize warehouse space, decreasing the overhead of operations.

4. Reduce costs

ERP allows the organization to obtain visibility of reward rates and margins of each product in stock. It enables the control of expired products, and also product due to expire, anticipating future needs, analyzing accurate data about stock movements and reducing costs. An efficient stock management implies that the products are stored properly, ordered and shipped at the right time. The ERP system will allow the identification of perfect time to order, reducing the expenses of a company by avoiding high levels of stock in storage and potential wastes. Preventive management and access to stock level in real time will allow you to avoid stock breaks. It will also make it possible to improve response time to your customers, reducing the associated costs.

5. Improve stakeholders relationship

ERP solutions provide you an accurate and fast demand forecasting. Despite misalignments between stock and demand cannot be completely eliminated, they can be significantly reduced. This allows the goal defined in advance, such as reduced stock investment, increased customer satisfaction and cost containment, are within reach. ERP will contribute to improve your relationship with customers and suppliers. With access to accurate and real-time stock levels, it will be possible to place orders to suppliers and ship products to customers efficiently.

6. Get access to useful and reliable data for better business management

One of the advantages of using an ERP system is the ability to store and generate information, easy to access and that’s shared throughout the organization. Available information allows you to evaluate performance indicators, provide cost and benefit analysis and improve productivity. Access to the data allows that all operations are performed with fluidity. Besides that, prevents task duplication and reduce error occurrence. It leads the company to an ideal stock management.

All companies, regardless their size, need efficient stock management. Taking decisions about inventory management can be a key factor in the success of any organization, to respond to constant changes in the market, with high levels of demand and where success may depend on the speed of that response. The effective way to achieve company goals and attend to your needs is through an Enterprise Resource Planning.

If you’re looking for a partnership to implement ERP solutions, you should contact blink-iT!

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