How an Inventory Strategy Can Help Your Business

How many times have you traveled to the store and purchased items that you already had? Alas, this happens all the time, but fortunately it’s usually a carton milk or a loaf of bread. When it happens in your business, it can be much more costly. Listed below is a recommendation for an inventory strategy that will stop you from spending tons of cash on redundant investments. 

Track Your Hardware

The first part of your inventory strategy is surprisingly an analog one.

You need to inventory all of your hardware. That includes servers and server components all the way down to your extra mouses. The best way to go about doing this is to get a label maker. No joke. There are label makers that are under $100 that allow users to print out labels with barcodes or qr codes on them. Tagging your hardware with labels that tell you everything you need to know about the item when the code is scanned can go a long way toward helping you manage your organization's physical inventory.

Inventory Management

The second part of a comprehensive inventory strategy is to utilize an inventory management platform. An inventory management system (IMS) is a tool that provides users with a method to track goods across your business. An IMS offers your business the transparency required to cut down on redundancy as well as manage your technology and other inventory. 

Utilizing IMS software, you can set up a lot of automated processes that can automatically order items, alert staff to restock items, and much more. However, for the inventory management platform to work, you will want to ensure that yours delivers the following features:

• Barcode scanner - An obvious addition that permits quick information on any tagged item. 
• Optimization - Ensure that you have the right amount of a product; overstocking and under-stocking can be problematic for numerous reasons.
• Report generation - Being able to view sales history, manage current inventory, manage sales levels and more. 
• POS integration - One beneficial strategy is to integrate your point-of-sale system and your IMS. 
• Purchase order management - Get an IMS that offers you a single view of purchasing records. 

Some inventory management systems come with additional features that automates warehouse management and gives you a look at product demand. For the average business that is just using their IMS to inventory their own assets, some high-end platforms may be unnecessary. The point is to be able to manage the assets you have.

If you would like to talk to a professional technician about an inventory management system or just discuss the best practices of keeping your technology managed properly, call Macro Systems today at 703-359-9211.