How distribution ERP improves your inventory management

Juggling inventory can leave you saddled with an overabundance of stock sat in warehouses, or a lack of enough to meet demand. Either situation costs you money and the latter can lose you customers, and damage your reputation.

ERP distribution systems help you track, monitor, predict, and manage your inventory so that you satisfy your customers and your revenue targets.

Track your inventory across all facilities with distribution ERP

If you have multiple locations nationally (or internationally), you need visibility of your stock across the whole organization. If you don’t have an item in stock in one warehouse, you may well have it in another. But having your staff call around slows you down. Customers expect faster service and a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ immediately. If you can’t fulfill their order in time, they’ll be off to the next supplier who can.  An ERP gives your people instant access to a centralized inventory database. A database that’s updated in real-time so you know exactly what you can or can’t fulfill and when the customer can expect delivery.

You can also track expenses related to sales. Are you spending too much on distribution because you don’t carry enough stock in the right locations? An ERP will help you identify revenue leakage points so you can better plan and decrease your cost per sale.

Depending on the ERP you choose, you can integrate with barcodes, QR codes or even IoT technology to automatically update inventory levels and whereabouts across all distribution centers.

Automated inventory control

Automated ERP features help eliminate wasted storage space, human error, and delays.  You can base ordering on preset time intervals, actual stock levels, and predicted demand. ERP systems can even manage complete product traceability and recalls. Because your inventory control is synced with each division across your business, you have the full picture in one portal.

Better demand forecasting reports fuelled by real-time data

How would you like to take the guesswork out of procurement with robust demand forecasting? An ERP system will help you keep track of sales, purchasing, logistics, and supply chain management so that you have the right inventory levels to match demand cycles for your business.

Do you have stock gathering dust? It’s one thing to know that it happens, it’s another to know exactly which items and why. Having insight into surplus inventory in real time means you might have the opportunity to return stock to your supplier (contract dependant) or kick a marketing campaign into action to get those items moved before they perish, become obsolete or just take up shelf space that something more profitable could be using.

No more basing critical business decisions on old data painstakingly pulled together from disparate data sets. You can gather all insights from one system with inbuilt analytics doing all the legwork. You can spend more time on strategic decision making and feel more confident thanks to data-backed logic.

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