According to the American Institute of Stress, about 83% of U.S. workers suffer from work-related stress. While this statistic encompasses all job roles, inventory management is known to be a high-pressure area due to its operational significance.
As the new year 2024 kicks in, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take inventory of your business stressors of the past 2023. What are the inefficiencies that gave you too much grief last year? And what is there to be done about them now? Let’s explore the 10 most pressing factors that put added pressure on the owners of small inventory-oriented businesses.
- Not knowing the actual inventory levels. 2024 finds a lot of small businesses grappling with the challenge of their inventory traceability. Some think they aren’t there yet scale-wise to transition from manual to automated inventory control. Meanwhile, having access to clean data is a make-or-break factor for all businesses no matter the size.
- Tedious data entry. Due to limited budgets and labor shortages, small businesses still rely heavily on manual inventory tracking. This opens the door to human errors, such as data entry mistakes or miscounts, which can lead to inaccurate stock levels and operational inefficiencies. Thousands of SKUs in spreadsheets could be a nightmare even for Excel addicts.
- Too few or unreliable verification layers. Has your business been too vulnerable to occasional errors during stock intake, cycle counts, or order fulfillment? There’s no such thing as ‘an honest mistake’ when you’re fighting for clients against the bigger and often more technologically advanced competition.
- Siloing. The inability to connect all the stakeholders and parties by giving them (or, if necessary, limiting) access to inventory, purchasing, and sale data inevitably causes headaches for everyone involved. Connection, not perfection is what makes businesses thrive.
- Scalability concerns. Having no real-time inventory tracking, spending hours on data entry, reconciling mistakes, or having trouble sharing data across teams makes it hardly possible to grow. Only by eliminating these stressors, you can finally stop overextending your staff and start expanding.
- Demand volatility. Rapid changes in consumer demand driven by trends, seasons, or economic shifts make forecasting difficult. Not having this historical data on hand makes you unable to respond to changes in replenishment, order fulfillment, and sales.
- Cost management. Increasing costs of raw materials, transportation, and labor put pressure on inventory budgets. Inventory holding costs can also add to that pressure if you don’t balance inventory levels to avoid excess holding costs while preventing stockouts.
- Technological integration. Integrating new technologies with existing systems can be complex and prone to errors, and an overwhelming experience in general.
- Employee training. Ensuring that employees are properly trained in inventory management processes and technologies is essential for maintaining efficiency and accuracy.
- Inventory reconciliations. Manual data entry and human oversight can lead to errors in inventory records. Identifying and correcting these errors during reconciliation can be frustrating and stressful for inventory managers. Reconciliations can be particularly challenging in businesses with large inventories or multiple storage locations. On top of that, inventory discrepancies can have significant financial implications, affecting the cost of goods sold (COGS), profitability, and financial reporting accuracy
Inventory management strategies to cope with stress in 2024
There’s no more sure-fire strategy than getting automated inventory control software. As an example of such, HandiFox Online brings precision, and pace, busting the key inventory management stress factors.
1. HandiFox Online provides visibility into your live inventory levels: what’s on purchase orders, and what’s promised to customers from any mobile platform and web browser
Knowing exactly how much of the product there is and where saves you the trouble of looking up and updating records, and gives you more time and confidence acting on this data.
2. There are at least three features in HandiFox Online that reduce and sometimes eliminate tedious and error-prone data entry:
- Bulk import/export through a CVS file
- Barcode scanning during stock intake, audits, and order fulfillment
- Real-time synchronization with QuickBooks Online
3. Thanks to the barcoding scanning abilities and certain settings that stop transactions with insufficient quantities or wrong items from being saved, HandiFox offers a multi-layered fail-proof mechanism that proactively fights errors.
4. All departments using the HandiFox Online app are connected but have clearly defined user roles and access rights, which puts a stop to data siloing but also protects sensitive data as per business needs.
5. The underlying structure and practices built into the app can be extended to a bigger number of warehouse locations and, as such, let your business grow without uprooting old processes.
6. The inventory app offers a wide range of purchasing and sales reports that shed some light on how products move based on the season.
7. Inventory holding costs are reduced thanks to automated reordering that factors in your pre-set reorder points, desired quantity on hand, and sales stats.
8. HandiFox is integrated with QuickBooks Online and Desktop to provide a seamless connection between inventory and accounting. Thanks to 24/7 logging, any discrepancies can be traced back to transactions or users that caused them.
9. Training employees is a lot easier to do when most of the operations are mapped out in one app. The best inventory management practices are techniques (batch tracking, FIFO/FEFO, automatic reordering, etc.) that are incorporated into the software take newcomers less time to process, and start employing when they say how they work in practice from day one.
10. Having inventory management software in place doesn’t irradicate errors. But the fact of having one simplifies the search for their causes. In HandiFox, all transactions are logged and most of them are linked to one another. That being said, it takes only a couple of clicks to crack the case.
By alleviating many of the manual, time-consuming, and error-prone aspects of inventory management, automated systems allow warehouse workers to operate more efficiently and with less stress. HandiFox can give you peace of mind by taking the unknowns out of your business and nailing the tasks that used to give you gray hair. Get free full-featured access for 14 days.
