The Role of Technology in Transforming Wholesale Inventory Management
If you run a wholesale business, you will be aware that your dealings with stock can be more confusing than those of your clientele. The businesses you sell to will have their own challenges staying on top of stock and managing their inventory. For a business that sells wholesale to other companies, you are dealing with a much larger stock margin. This means that tracking becomes vital.
However, as any wholesaler will know, stock management is not easy in the wholesale industry. It requires a huge amount of time and patience to control, and even then, there is always the spectre of human error reducing your results. With that in mind, many people use an inventory management system.
These tools make it much easier for companies, including wholesalers, to stay on top of their stock management. If you find it hard to manage stock and track where items are going, investing in inventory management systems might be the wisest decision that your company can make.
How Can Technology Improve Wholesale Inventory Management?
Thanks to the use of inventory management systems, companies can look forward to a much easier time when tracking inventory. When installed and designed to suit your own business specifically, the results can be highly impressive. How does this technology make such a telling difference?
Automated Fulfilment
One of the main benefits of inventory management systems is the presence of automation. Fulfilling orders is one of a business’s most time-demanding roles, but with an inventory management platform, this can be automated.
Wholesalers can integrate automation into their fulfilment pipeline, ensuring that orders are fulfilled automatically as required. This reduces the risk of human error, such as sending your business partner 100 quantities instead of 10. It will also reduce the risk of orders being wrong, avoid high shipping costs, and avoid the need for returns. In turn, this boosts your business’s ability to do business accurately.
Tools such as inventory management systems can help ensure that a wholesaler only sends out what its partner has ordered. This avoids the waste of time and materials, as well as the management and tracking of returns.
Easier Order Tracking
Another key benefit of using inventory management systems in wholesaling is the ability to track orders. Everything is easily tracked since everything is managed through one platform that the whole business uses. Most inventory management systems allow for monitoring so you can see what stage of delivery a shipment is at. Some can even provide automated tracking that, with the use of GPS tools, allows for easy tracking to know exactly where a shipment is.
This is great for customer service, as it means wholesalers can provide accurate timelines for delivery to their clients and partners. Easier tracking means you can give definitive answers to those who buy from you, building trust and helping them see that your business is on the ball.
Greater Data Analysis
Another key benefit of using inventory management systems in wholesaling is that you can better analyse how your business is performing. This can help you make wise decisions about everything from the products you are wholesaling to the partnerships you can trust to build upon.
This also allows for greater sales optimisation, where a business can look closely at where their sales seem to fall off. By spotting bottlenecks and issues that are more complex than they need to be, wholesalers can see at what stage of the buying cycle things seem to be getting more complicated. This can then be adjusted to help avoid this kind of problematic planning.
Creating The Right Orders
Also, wholesalers can benefit from using inventory management systems to predict what their partners need. Many wholesalers receive questions from long-term partners asking what other products they could offer them that they have available. With an inventory management system, you can more easily study and analyse what kind of items would be a good fit for that particular client.
This makes it easier to spot buying patterns, pair commonly purchased items, and give the partner or client a greater idea of what other products you have to offer. It also makes it easier to increase sales, upsell other items to partners you already have, and show off your selection with a greater degree of accuracy.
Save Time & Avoid Wastage
The main benefit of using inventory management systems is that they can help save your staff’s most valuable commodity: time. If your staff can spend less time manually analysing figures and devising solutions, they can spend more time liaising with customers, building new partnerships, and finding the best items to have on sale.
Reducing the time your staff spends doing jobs that can be automated and done quicker via computing is vital to running a successful wholesale business. From spotting patterns quickly to verifying shipments quickly, your staff can get more done in a much smaller timeframe.
With everyone working from one platform, your staff get used to using the one in-house system. This improves staff comfort in their day-to-day operations. Staff who feel more comfortable in their job are much more likely to get the job done promptly and efficiently. This allows staff who are usually dealing with order fulfilment and other administrative tasks to use the data in the inventory management system to speed things along, improving how productive staff can be day-to-day.
Looking To Invest In inventory management systems?
If you are intent on investing in an inventory management system, you need an expert you can rely upon. At BlueHub, we provide that service. Our business is built around offering high-quality software solutions that can modernise your business and make it easier than ever to manage stock.
Contact BlueHub today if you would like to discuss the benefits of investing in inventory management systems. We can show you how such a system could benefit your business and help you understand why this investment is worth making.