Whether you’re stocking merchandise or office supplies, having an organised stock keeping process can help to make your company faster and more efficient. Here are some steps you should take when organising your inventory.
Make sure you have adequate storage space
Having enough space to store your stock is important – a room that’s too poky could end becoming cluttered if there isn’t enough to room clearly separate out stock. By adding shelving units as found at sites like www.raretimbershelving.com, you can make use of a room’s vertical space and create your own mini-warehouse. If you don’t have enough space on your premises, you may have to hire space elsewhere to store the majority of your stock – just make sure that this local enough so that you can easily access it.
Use an organised filing system
There are four types of stock that you should always separate – these include consumables to run your business (e.g. office supplies), raw materials for production, work-in-progress goods that aren’t ready to sell and finished products that you can sell. Once you’ve made this division, come up with a individual filing system for each of these four types of stock. You could locate items in alphabetical order or have sub-categories. Make sure that this all labelled, along with other important information on each item (food ingredients may need to have a clearly labelled expiry date, whilst chemicals may need to have handling instructions).
Set a maximum and minimum stock level
For each item in your inventory, you need to set a maximum and minimum number of items that you want to stock. A maximum stock level will stop you spending unnecessary money on surplus items. A minimum stock level will prevent you reaching a situation in which you may run out of this stock – a lack of a certain product could mean disappointing clients, whilst a lack of work supplies such as paper or printer ink could stall business productivity. You should also set a number in which you need to reorder new stock – this should be above the minimum stock level.
Take regular stock takes
You need to be recording exactly how much of each stock you have as regularly as possible. This could be done at the end of each day or the end of each week depending on the amount of resources you get through in any given period. Keep records of each stock take so that you can always reference previous ones.
Become more efficient with digital technology
By digitally recording your stock takes, you can make life easier and faster for yourself. Programmes can now automatically order stock for you once an item hits a certain figure. If you work in retail meanwhile, linking up your till to your stock inventory can help you to know when stock is sold automatically doing a stock take for you. You can find such software at https://ww2.inflowinventory.com/. Many companies are even using tablets or using scanners and bar codes to speed up stock takes.