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Simple Tips for Manufacturers to Handle Inventory Management Challenges
Inventory management plays a dominant role in certain areas, such as manufacturing, construction, and retail. Proper handling of this essential process helps in business growth. Hence, the onus of the manufacturer is to get the best personnel and digital support in this field, as a variety of challenges is quite common.
Competition in every field is high; if that was not enough, COVID has put further pressure on every aspect of the business. To know more about the COVID effect, you can refer to this report. Disruptions in the supply chain and other inventory management challenges lead to significant financial losses and trust issues among customers. Hence a reliable inventory tracking system is the need of the hour.
This blog deals with the common challenges and how high-quality inventory management software will eliminate them from the supply chain and other crucial areas.
Every manufacturer is keen to crush the roadblocks; it helps achieve higher profits and improve customer satisfaction. The key and most common problems in manufacturing inventory management are:
- Limited visibility of inventory: Practically, it is next to impossible to keep an eye on every material, its quantity and location, manually. Such a situation can lead to improper maintenance of inventory presence, causing expiry of raw materials, frequent purchase of raw materials in small quantities. The staff would require to search for the material; thus, leading to wastage of time.
Well-developed MES inventory management software will easily track inventory from loading dock to assembly lines to customer delivery. The system can be designed to access details of every material with a few mouse clicks. It will surely help reduce wastage and save time.
- Keeping up with overstocks: A few items could be overstocked. Managing them could be tricky, especially if the items are perishable. It could lead to huge losses as the raw material could turn into junk.
Including lean inventory management techniques in the software can lead to the usage of materials that have an earlier expiry date. Storing the materials as per the expiry date and frequency of use are a few issues that the software handles, making it simpler for the floor manager.
- Inefficient handling of inventory: Manual handling can lead to improper management. Issues such as expiry of raw materials, failure to locate obsolete materials, and inability to deliver raw materials on time would be a daily chore. Such problems would hurt the efficiency.
A customized version of inventory management software will aid in increasing production efficiency as it will provide the floor manager with the correct status of the product. Many manufacturers request to include a reminder in case that material reaches a minimum quantity. It will help them, floor managers, to place orders for the raw material. It will eliminate the non-availability of stock or over-stocking.
- Lack of real-time reporting: It was hard to point a defective item with the traditional techniques. It could sometimes lead to manufacturing faulty items in large quantities.
Digital solutions have made it easy to point out the defect. It will surely help reduce wastage and save time. Further, it will not hamper the relation with the customer. To know other benefits of adopting digital solutions, you can check on another blog Benefits of Digital Transformation in Manufacturing Industries.
- Lack of trendsetting: Manual systems cannot deliver summaries and reports accurately, and they take time to do so. It will hamper the accurate forecast; thus, not helping the business positively.
Good inventory software could be the best aid as it can forecast trends. It will help in acquiring raw materials accordingly and meet the market demands. It will portray the company positively and gather more customers.
The above-mentioned issues are the most commonly faced by manufacturers. They could come across other problems as well. Discussing with the software development company will help in addressing them efficiently. It will surely help in improving the company’s performance.