Unique and unforeseen events are forcing every business manager to better analyze and utilize their resources. This includes capital, staff, facilities, vendors and more. Especially difficult as we emerge from the COVID lockdown is personnel. If you can’t add staff or find qualified people to fill open positions, you need to increase your existing productivity to compensate. And you need to do it fast. Want to do more inventory planning with the resources you have? Or maybe you need to move a person to another critical department but that would mean not being able to plan your entire inventory.
A surefire way to help increase productivity and effectiveness is to automate your inventory planning process. If, you are still relying heavily on spreadsheets and reports from your ERP system, you should evaluate new options. We have seen ERP systems that take you through a multi-step process every time you want to set a stocking quantity for an item. Or they require you to set a minimum quantity amount and safety stock. Others offer only rudimentary forecasting and planning which can cause an inventory to get more out of balance and certainly do not offer optimization.
Why would you want to waste your inventory planners’ time on extensive manual analysis to figure out what needs to be stocked, how much and when? It’s like driving a car without power steering and power brakes, you can get where you are going but with a whole lot of effort. Or washing dishes by hand which not only wastes time but also wastes a lot of water, both precious resources.
In order to improve the productivity of your planners, you need to give them the proper tools. Tools that will give them the information they need to make informative and more correct decisions about your inventory. Best-in-breed inventory planning and optimization solutions are available that simplify the task of managing an inventory. Not only does the planner’s productivity go way up, but your dollar investment in inventory will actually go down.
Savvy leading companies rely heavily on new technologies to improve their competitive advantage. This means they are getting more value out of the resources they own while dramatically improving the service to their customers. Imagine having hundreds of thousands of extra cash in the bank. Think about it. You are sitting on a ton on money in your inventory. Isn’t it time that inventory pays you back extra dividends? Well, it can and you owe it to yourself, your employees and your customers to get more with less. Imagine how happy you will all be, when you can fill all your orders and have more money in the bank.
Cloud applications for business usually are offered in a subscription model called Software-as-a-Service or SaaS. Going to a SaaS deployment spreads the cost of acquiring and implementing a new solution and adds to the benefits. A SaaS deployment provides you with the flexibility you need for easier, more accessible inventory planning. Cloud computing today has real meaning and positive impact for companies in a challenging global economy. The future is that more business applications for mobile computing will be available and virtual software appliances are being developed every day.
SaaS applications for business are more plentiful and affordable. Solutions specifically built for the web are in active use around the world. Companies are deciding to employ a cloud model to reduce capital and operational expenditure, reduce costs, increase business agility, and boost their ability to deliver IT on demand. Supply chain planning is a prime candidate process for the Cloud.
This combination of technologies allows you to work smarter by easily adapting all aspects of inventory management into one advanced, simple-to-use software product you can use any time anywhere. The software lets all levels of employees understand and use the system. Instead of having one staff member dedicated to inventory planning, any employee can quickly learn and operate the software. Utilizing existing staff helps to keep costs low while expanding their capabilities.
