Inventory management software, find out if it’s for you
Maybe you still have one in your neighborhood? One of those old mom and pop hardware stores, or a restaurant where they do things the old way? Where you step up to the counter with your purchase and the old shopkeeper leans down, and with a tiny stub of pencil on a torn off piece of brown paper he adds up the total. You suddenly remember those odd-sized screws that you couldn’t find online and ask the old fellow if he has any in stock. His eyes focus on a point somewhere beyond the horizon while he scans his mental inventory management software and, yes, he remembers exactly where they are, deep in the cool, shadowed recesses of the store. Similar scenes have played out all through history, going all the way back to ancient Sumer in all probability. The business owner who knows every nook and cranny of their inventory, who orders the material they need in just the right quantities and at exactly the right time, man and commerce in perfect harmony, unchanged throughout the years.
The human brain is a marvelous organ but at some point, when your volume of business grows beyond sole trader status it will need some help from modern technology. As your business grows you will need to rely on more than excellent memory. What will happen when you go to ask for a loan and the lender asks you for a list of your expenses from the last three years?
Today we’re going to look at a great solution for any business: Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM. CRM is not only an inventory management software, but features many tools that can also help you with business management and incident resolution.
Before getting to know Integria IMS in more detail, let’s go back to the beginning and understand what inventory management software is. What do we mean when we talk about inventory? And how can we develop software that helps us to keep track of it? You should know whether you can carry on using traditional methods or if it’s time to make the change to a technological solution.
What is an inventory?
Basically, it’s a list of goods or products in stock. Thanks to the inventory system you can keep track of your goods, and the various actions related to them:
- Keep a detailed register of products and other assets in the company’s possession.
- Keep close control of operations, purchases, sales or rents.
Administration and inventory management software
Inventory management software gives the user instant access to all their devices’ inventories as well as direct access to licenses.
As you can see, this simplifies the job for system administrators in charge of the organization’s PCs and servers. When speaking of administration and inventory management software it refers to more than just those burdensome spreadsheets we all know and tolerate, and moves into a more placid terrain, in which the user has all the necessary information organized and cataloged, in one place, and with search functions to have the information a few clicks away.
How it can help
Managing an inventory is a hard and difficult task so this can be a lot more bearable by using helpdesk software, which helps you to organize your products and client list. These can be ordered by category, date or price, among other options. Administrating your inventory this way is more efficient and is going to have a positive effect on your resources, in terms of saving time, money and office space.
What are the basics that any inventory management software should have?
- If we’re talking about sales inventory then your software ought to improve the organization of purchases and sales, avoiding having excess, or lack of, stock. In order to do this your chosen software needs to be intuitive and easy to use, and be able to display a global view of all your inventory, showing the user what is being sold at any given moment, and calculate the balance of income and expenses, and offering total control of all your products.
- Goods should be able to be cataloged with different labels, by quantity, expiry date, address, and so on.
- It needs to be flexible enough to include various categories for your products. Not all inventory software has this capability, so look for a tool you can customize according to your needs.
- It is also necessary that your software is able to trigger stock alerts to trigger warnings when something is not right, whether it’s in sales or your hardware. Stop worrying about all the things you might have forgotten and let the software carry the weight.
- Last but not least, inventory management software needs to be able to generate custom reports targeted to specific profiles, giving information on sales, sales predictions, the current status of your expenses and a whole range of diverse and essential business metrics.
How big does my company have to be before I need to think about investing in inventory management?
Inventory Management software is designed for any business that offers a product or service, and wants to maintain oversight of what is leaving and entering its warehouses. It is also valid for controlling a company’s fixed assets.
If your company is involved in complex projects this kind of software is also useful for organizing the resources, deadlines, and personnel involved.
Another example would be for a company of any type of project, for example a group of architects, a group of social educators and even computer scientists, you create an inventory and make a proposal and wait to see if they give you a grant for your project.
Inventory software is a plus for almost any business, and the bigger the business, the more importance it acquires
Returning to our mom and pop store from the top of the article, and their paper and pencil and mental inventory. When the grandson comes in to help on a Saturday, and there’s a run on square nuts he may not realize it’s time to order more. Inventory management software will send you an alert when stock is running low, or has run out, and can even be configured to place orders automatically. It can also tell you that those elliptical offset locknuts are slow sellers and you shouldn’t be placing any more orders for now.
Integria IMS includes everything an inventory system requires:
- It’s flexible: Objects, fields and relations are defined by an administrator, making stock management easy. You can also implement a management database with a record of previous inventory actions, and also link it up with a CRM and ticketing tool. Imagine there is an incident with a product you sold? The software will direct you to the product in question giving you a quick heads up that there is a situation to resolve.
- It contains all the necessary functions to manage all your company’s assets, their location, the manufacturer, support contracts, personnel, contact details, etc. All the information can be made searchable according to terms that are the best for you, by date, price, serial number, category, popularity, whatever works best. Inventory objects can be associated to tickets, again, making for more efficient management.
- The alerts system means you’ll never be caught without a product in stock, and incident management is much quicker.
- It includes a knowledge base and customizable reports.
We hope you find this article helpful, and we encourage you to investigate how inventory software like Integria IMS, can reduce your overheads by saving time, space and money.