Inventory space is a highly dynamic, collaborative, time- and labor-intensive environment. It requires sophisticated coordination and efficient time management. Putting together well thought-out spreadsheets and encouraging your inventory team to make more confirmation phone calls before order dispatch achieve neither of these. A more sensible strategy would be setting your sights on available technologies whose business functions are to help digitize and automate routine tasks, step up accuracy, better team collaboration, relieve employees of manual data entry, aggregation and analysis.
Your purchasing, inventory planning, warehouse management, and sales teams can work in different places but stay aligned 100% of the time thanks to online inventory management software like HandiFox Online. Let’s dive in on what your employees can gain by using the system.
Warehouse staff
Warehouses are a real trouble spot - a few miscounts here and there, thinking there is enough inventory to fill an incoming order while there isn’t, or mispacking an order. One thing leads to another and before you know it’s a mess. With the HandiFox Online warehouse management app your warehouse operators will be able to
- Look up, identify, and input products within seconds, using the app’s barcoding functionality.
- Count and adjust inventory a lot faster. The time spent on physical inventory is reduced by 50% due to the use of barcode scanners and the ability to count concurrently.
- Receive inventory against purchase orders. They can verify, count and check incoming stock into the system in real time. Inventory levels get updated automatically.
- Process the outflow of products. Pickers and packers verify shipments through barcode scanning in a fast and accurate way.
- Follow item lists or pick lists without having to print them out. In case they do need a hard copy, all transactions are printable.
- Keep everyone on the team up-to-date with any changes to stock.
Purchasing specialists
Getting real-time updates from the warehouse makes the life of a purchasing division a whole lot easier. If they make sure to follow closely what the system is telling them, the following tasks will present no problem:
- Setting reorder points and desired quantities on hand. By analyzing the inputs of warehouse operators and watching sales metrics, the procurement learns to determine optimal inventory levels.
- Knowing what is going wrong. Stockout and surplus inventory problems are identified and fixed before hindering order fulfillment.
- Thinking short- and long-term. They actually would not need to exercise forecasting as the system makes data-driven replenishment suggestions based on historical data.
- Generating replenishment purchase orders (PO) automatically. You can populate a PO based on sales data for a given period of time, as well as reorder point and desired quantity on hand values. The app will also calculate your replenishment needs for the foreseeable future.
Sales team
The work of your customer-facing part of the team will be supported and expedited through:
- Managing customers on mobile devices. Sales reps can view/review/edit/enter customer information, their balance, and track related operations on the go.
- Staying always up-to-date on inventory movements, even if warehouses are geographically dispersed. This gives more flexibility in securing sales.
- Generating and printing Invoices and Sales receipts, as well as entering credit memos for returned items.
- Documenting payment receipt.
Accounting
Do you have a bookkeeper on the team or prefer third-party accounting? The software is seamlessly integrated with QuickBooks Online. As long as your accounting expert has access to the accounting software, they will be able to:
- Work on financials and taxes. HandiFox Online keeps a copy of products, vendors, customer lists, inventory transfers, purchases and sales the same way QuickBooks Online does. So accumulating and parsing data for inventory reporting should not be a problem for an experienced accountant.
- Eliminate double entry. They would not have to download inventory data from HandiFox to upload it into QuickBooks as the two systems talk to each other through a two-way synchronization
- Export and repurpose the data kept in HandiFox for accounting purposes manually in case the company is not using accounting software.
Business owner
Running an inventory-based business, especially with multiple storage sites spread across a wide geographical area is hardly a job with a healthy work-life balance. You need to be on top of everything that is going on in and outside of warehouse facilities. Not only does HandiFox wrestles with inventory-related difficulties but it also helps foresee these bottlenecks due to:
- 24/7 access and oversight over all warehouse facilities with no ties to the office thanks to the cloud.
- Centralized inventory management with a dashboard that helps stay alert to low stock and other issues requiring your immediate attention or a plan of action.
- Staying attuned to seasonality and rapid demand changes by making use of inventory and sales reports.
Making all workflows functional is hard enough on its own, not to say anything about agile. The automation and barcoded inventory control provided by HandiFox Online let your small inventory-centric business achieve the much-needed speed and efficiency. Take a 30-day trial and see how you can minimize the bumps in the way of your teams doing their work.