A scalable sales and inventory management system is the backbone of running and growing your business. Often, an order and inventory system makes the difference between successful companies and companies with little or no growth. To stay on top of the competition, you need to re-evaluate your software periodically to determine if it aligns with your business goals. We’ve compiled a list of the top five reasons to upgrade your sales and inventory management system.
Reasons to Upgrade Your Inventory Software
Integration
According to McAfee, companies with fewer than 1,000 employees run an average of 22 applications on an average – yep, that’s a lot! To ensure that your resources aren’t spending their time re-entering data on multiple software, it is critical for your sales and inventory software to be able to “talk” to other software you are already using. For example, if your order and inventory software doesn’t play nice or integrate with your accounting software, it may be a sign to look for a better solution.
Improve Sales
If you are a business owner, you already know that your number one priority is to grow your sales. With a sound order and inventory management system, you can keep better track of inventory, sell faster, improve relationships with your customers.
Better Customer Service
Depending on the industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer can be up to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. To earn repeat business, you must ensure that you give your customers the best ordering experience and ship their orders on time. Your inventory management software must be able to provide you with accurate reports or even assist you with demand planning and reordering. Not having the right products at the right time can be detrimental to your relationship with customers and often results in your customers taking their business elsewhere.
Increase Productivity
The primary purpose of investing in any software is to automate business processes and improve productivity. Choosing an inventory software that doesn’t meet your needs or is challenging to use can be disastrous. Ideally, your inventory software must enable your warehouse team to pick and ship products faster and manage inventory with little to no manual intervention. A solid inventory management system will help you spend less time on stock management and more time growing your business.
Centralized Inventory
Some inventory systems are only capable of managing the inventory in a single warehouse location. This limitation can create significant problems if you aim to grow your business into more territories. It would be much more efficient to use a centralized inventory management system in such cases. The benefits of using a centralized inventory system include better visibility of inventory, easier inter-warehouse transfers, and automatically routing orders to warehouses based on stock availability and lead time.
Final Thoughts
A good sales and inventory management system are crucial to building a successful business. Implementing the perfect software for your needs can be the key to growing your company. It is worth taking the time to identify and evaluate the gap between your current inventory software and your business goals, both short-term and long-term.
