Inventory Management

Clear coherence between the roles of every decision maker within the organization

Inventory Management Issues

Most companies that manufacture or distribute physical products deal with these inventory management issues on a daily basis:

“Out of stock” – which results in lost production opportunities

“Excess inventory” – which results in additional storage costs and potential cost hits to promote or move inventory out

“Shrinkage” – inventory misplaced or stolen which results in lost production and employee trust

“Slow moving and obsolete inventory” – which results in write-offs and disposal fees

Contact Us

Invoke Consulting has worked extensively in all of these areas and can assist your company with achieving their inventory management objectives. Speak to us today about your goals and how we can help.

Inventory Management Tools

With careful planning most of these costs can be avoided and many tools have been developed over the years for managing inventory:

ABC Analysis – examining the velocity and cost of inventory to ensure your company doesn’t run out of key items

Cycle Counting and Zero Counts – routinely counting inventory to observe trends in inventory discrepancy

Barcoding – to avoid human error in data entry and to quicken the rate of data capture

Vendor Managed Inventory – allowing your supplier to stock a certain amount of inventory at their own cost, billing your company based on consumption, and, additionally, allowing them to manage the inventory on your behalf, where reasonable.

Obsolescence, Dispositioning, and Reporting – looking at inventory that has slowed in velocity or needs to be disposed of, in order to avoid additional costs of management and storage

IMPLEMENTATION AND THE MANAGEMENT

In each of these cases the implementation and the management of the processes deployed must be carefully considered in order to provide lasting results.

Going beyond the basics of managing inventory inside the 4 walls of your own facility there are additional areas of inventory to consider:

SubContracting

What happens when you want to employ subcontracting and have others produce part of your value chain? Who owns the goods and how are they managed?

3rd Party Warehouses

When your successful company grows and needs more space, how can you use and manage inventory at 3rd party warehouses?

Consigning Goods

What happens when you would like to consign inventory to your customers and secure their business for the future?

Inventory Count

How can you keep the inventory count process lean and accurate. The larger your company grows, the more important real-time inventory becomes. How do you maintain visibility?