Custom Software for Efficient Supply Chain Management
If you operate a business in a major industry like manufacturing, retail, or logistics, you will understand the value of supply chain management. If your supply chain becomes broken, it can mean every aspect of your business begins to fail. That failure can become expensive regarding time lost, reputational damage, and profitability. Many companies in these industries, though, rely upon generic software.
Today, the use of custom software for efficient supply chain management can be the difference maker. Instead of your IT team having to try and contort the features of general-purpose software to fit your business needs, custom software gives you 100% control over everything.
However, having bespoke software developed naturally costs more than licensing something that already exists.
How Custom Software Optimises Supply Chain Management
Let’s examine how a custom software package for your business could optimise supply chain operations.
Catching Inventory Issues
One of the best features of custom software is that it can be tailored to fit your exact inventory. Many general-purpose software packages cannot define your inventory as you would like uniquely. With a custom system, though, you can develop an inventory management program that allows for quick and easy searching of your available inventory.
This also means you can spot inventory issues when stock is low. With custom software, you can have it so that new stock is ordered once you exceed a certain limit or number.
Avoiding Overstock
One of the best benefits of supply chain management via custom software is avoiding overstock. This software makes it easy to know when a hot-selling product reaches a low stock rate. For example, if you have X amount of a product and you know that you sell Y amount per day, you need to ensure that you have enough stock – on average – to last until your supplier can deliver more.
With custom software, you can easily set up alerts so that a staff member can contact suppliers to arrange deliveries ahead of time. With the use of sales trends, though, you can also make sure that you avoid overbuying stock that is not selling as well as it was previously.
Accurate Communications
With a bespoke software package, it is much easier to turn to your suppliers and tell them exactly what you need. This avoids issues like sending products you do not need back to a supplier, angering them by wasting their time and logistics. This also makes it easier to tell where items are – especially important when shipping items in a retail business or delivering products in logistics.
With a custom software package, you can make it easier to have bespoke tracking for every shipment that leaves your business. This means that you can easily converse with suppliers and clients alike to ensure that stock and purchases arrive on time, every time. This is especially useful for maintaining positive relations with suppliers and customers, avoiding bad blood or arguments.
Cost Control
One of the best benefits of having an in-house software solution is that you can avoid costs from soaring needlessly high. With the help of custom supply chain software, you can have more accurate forecasts on demand for goods and services. This makes it easier for you to keep costs under control.
Also, you can find that it is much easier to deliver things like transportation route planning. You can spot the most efficient routes being used in your supply chain, ensuring that products offered for sale and shipped out to customers can arrive in the most optimal time.
Reduce Interventions
When running a business, you have so many things to do that having to get involved in resolving supply chain errors can feel like a waste of your time and resources. With that in mind, you might consider reducing interventions using bespoke software.
Bespoke software provides so many individual insights and notifications that you can resolve the key problems that have plagued your business in the past without having to get involved yourself.
Authentic Updates
When suppliers ask you how many of a certain product has been sold, or a customer wants to know where their products are, you must give accurate answers to maintain positive relations. That is why bespoke software is so useful: it can be designed to ensure that things like tracking and product visibility are much easier to read.
This allows you to provide much closer estimates of the delivery times. This makes your business more transparent, helping to keep suppliers and customers happy simultaneously. This can create a more positive result, making suppliers more likely to stick around and buyers return for more.
Future Scalability
Also, custom software is great for ensuring your business can continue growing. It is easier to add more advanced features to software built bespoke for your business than it is to add additional features to a general-purpose package. This makes it easier for your business to grow in the future, as you do not have to worry about rebuilding the entire in-house system due to getting too big.
Managing the future scalability of your business without the business collapsing in on itself is very useful. For that reason, custom software is great for supply chain management now and in the future when you might need more advanced, high-end functions that generic services cannot offer.
Standard Procedure
Lastly, one of the major benefits of custom software is that it can create a standard way for the whole business to operate. Without a clear standard, you can find that one department can be actively working against another simply because they do things so differently. By creating a standard, though, you ensure that each part of your business operates in tandem instead of feeling like opposition to each other.
With every staff member using the same system, every department can work in harmony and get more done with less.
Looking For Bespoke Software For Supply Chain Management?
If so, it pays to work with a specialist with experience crafting bespoke software for your industry and niche. Should you require help and advice in creating the best software solution overall, contact BlueHub today. We can give you all the assistance you need to develop a bespoke software package for your business that can simplify supply chain management moving forward.