Many businesses have a hard time keeping track of all their goods and supplies, resulting in wasted resources and lost revenue. If your business is facing this problem, consider investing in warehouse and inventory management. Here’s why this could be the solution your business needs.
The Difference Between Warehouse and Inventory Management
Before we go into the benefits of warehouse and inventory management, you should first know the difference between the two. This allows you to determine how to apply them to your business operation successfully.
Inventory Management
As the name implies, inventory management focuses on your warehouse’s inventory—the flow of incoming and outgoing products or raw materials. It involves ordering stocks, anticipating future supply and demand, and tracking and updating your records to check for under- or overstocked inventory.
Warehouse Management
Meanwhile, warehouse management covers all the procedures involved in running the warehouse, including inventory management. It also covers other warehousing functions, such as:
- Item Receiving: This involves scheduling the docking time for arriving orders to reduce the time between moving products from the dock to the stock.
- Picking and Packing: Select items for customer orders and pack them for outgoing shipments.
- Shipping Preparations: The steps involved in arranging for client orders to be delivered by courier or freight services.
- Labor Scheduling: Arranging worker schedules to optimize productivity and minimize downtimes.
- Warehouse Layout Planning: Assessing the warehouse’s storage capacity, then organizing the spaces and shelving for optimal routes, equipment maneuvering, and staff safety.
The Challenges of Warehousing and Tracking Inventory
Managing a warehouse comes with several challenges that you’ll need to overcome for smooth and efficient operation. Among the biggest concerns are space utilization and tracking.
Space Utilization
Aim to make the most of the available space in the warehouse. You may add vertical racks, integrate shelves that store similar items, and minimize aisle sizes without compromising traffic flow, stacking, or retrieval. Many businesses struggle to make these improvements effectively.
Tracking
As for tracking, some businesses still track items manually, resulting in numerous errors that waste time and money. Others utilize some degree of automation—but weak or ineffective implementation can lead to further problems.
Effective warehouse and inventory management takes these problems off your plate.
How Investing in Warehouse and Inventory Management Benefits Your Business
Implementing an effective warehouse inventory management system provides your business with several advantages.
Quality Control
In a warehouse management system, you can have a dedicated staging area for inspecting incoming shipments, allowing personnel to inspect your orders for damage or tampering. They can also check if the shipments contain the right number of items ordered before accepting them.
Of course, inspections should still be performed even when the goods have already been shelved. They could still get damaged in storage or reach their expiration date, so you will want to remove them, so they do not get shipped out to customers.
Such practices help keep your inventory’s quality at a higher level, thus ensuring your consumers also receive quality products from you.
Wiser Purchasing Decisions
Inventory management gives you a better overview of what products are in demand and which ones aren’t. Such information would help you with future purchases. You could order less of a product that doesn’t sell as well, so you don’t have too many excess goods on hand. It would also give you room for the goods that sell more.
For example, a sporting goods warehouse might discover that one sports brand always runs out faster. In this case, they can buy more of the in-demand brand.
Track and Pick Inventory Faster
Warehouse and inventory management systems would also save warehouse workers the time and effort of manually searching for an item. For example, you could have a database for your inventory that lets you know which part of the warehouse and what shelf the product is located on.
Since you can track and pick the items much faster, inventory tracking would also improve your packing and shipping time, allowing you to send out more orders each day.
Utilize Warehouse Space Optimally
As warehousing management also involves arranging your warehouse’s layout, you’d now have the opportunity to use the spaces to their best capability. For instance, you can have easily navigable paths made for the workers to save them time and energy traversing throughout the warehouse.
Moreover, optimizing warehouse spaces also gives you more inventory room, increasing your stocks for existing products or introducing new goods.
Mesa Moving & Storage is Here to Help You
At Mesa Moving & Storage, we aren’t just focused on storing and staging your goods for delivery. Our warehouse storage centers also provide warehouse inventory management, so you don’t have to worry about your inventory’s movements and the overall workflow of the warehouse. Furthermore, you can rely on us for fulfillment services—not only do we store your items, but we’ll also ship them out to your customers too!
You can get in touch with us today, and let’s talk about how to improve your operations with our warehousing solutions.
