In ideal circumstances, inventory management provides clarity about your inventory levels throughout your entire organization. In practice, inventory management is often a hodgepodge of digital and manual systems, some of them from different companies, and often inaccurate or incompatible with one another. These conditions make accurately tracking everything from raw materials to tools on job sites incredibly difficult. Cloud Inventory provides best-in-class tools that help you overcome these common problems.
Overcoming Fragmentation
Any time businesses merge or one business acquires another, there is the inevitable struggle to understand what the new business possesses in terms of inventory. Even if the old company used software to track inventory, as often as not, it focused on things like what was in warehouses.
Switching over to digital inventory management lets a company consolidate all of that information from legacy systems, but also integrate siloed information from the entirety of the business. More importantly, it lets the business track inventory deployed into the field, such as equipment or raw materials.
This closer tracking allows businesses to more carefully manage inventory levels both in warehouses and in the field. That helps reduce the common, but wasteful, practice of inventory hedging.
Improved Accuracy
One of the common pitfalls of inventory management is that it often relies on expertise on the software itself. Unfortunately, inventory software often has a steep learning curve and user-unfriendly interfaces. That can prove a major stumbling block to adoption, particularly for workers that don’t normally interact with complex software.
Worse still, the software often requires something like a laptop for workers to effectively interface with the software. Not every work environment proves friendly to laptops.
Cloud Inventory helps businesses overcome these problems in a couple of ways. One, it offers mobile apps for the software. Providing a mobile app means workers no longer need to worry about bringing a laptop to the job site and then protecting it from site hazards.
These apps must also, by virtue of living on a phone, minimize the complexity of the software. It must work on a phone screen and with touchscreen functions. This simplification encourages adoption of the software with workers who might otherwise ignore it.
This enhances the accuracy of your inventory data both on-site in places like warehouses, as well as in field environments.
Flexibility
Current market conditions remain volatile and that situation won’t likely repair itself in the near future. The means that companies need a clear understanding of changing demand and their inventory capacities. For example, if a company sees early signs of an uptick in demand, they can react with orders for more raw materials or begin moving inventory from a central warehouse to regional distribution centers.
The Cloud Inventory system makes these kinds of adjustments a much faster and smoother process for businesses. That increased flexibility helps businesses meet market changes and altered demand better.
Digital inventory management provides solutions to the historical pain points in standalone and manual inventory systems. It allows for real-time updates to your inventory, both on-site and in the field. This lets you more carefully monitor and manage inventory levels, while also cutting down on problems like inventory hedging. Mobile apps improve user adoption by limiting the complexity of the software and confining it to easily managed phones or tablets. Cloud inventory also helps boost efficiency when inventory demands change, allowing for a more flexible approach to volatile market conditions.
Excel Bookkeeping Templates
This free bookkeeping excel template can be used by anyone and any small business. Excel is a fantastic spread sheeting program and if you already have it on your computer, you already have the means to start your bookkeeping. You can also use a free version of Excel by opening a Microsoft account.
