How to manage your inventory? These are some tips for you

Inventory Management

By: John B. Vinturella

About author: John has almost 40 years experience as a management and strategic consultant, entrepreneur, author, and college professor. For 20 of those years, Dr. Vinturella was owner/president of a distribution company that he founded. He is a principal in business opportunity sites jbv.com and muddledconcept.com

Magento Inventory management extension

When I owned an inventory-based business, one of my customers had a clever barb in his repertoire. If we were out of anything, he needed in his order, he would say "You know? This would be a great place to open a supply house."

But supply, we did for 20 years on my watch. We were in a smaller market, handling about 10,000 separate items, so we enjoyed few economies of scale. We competed with some large distributors and did very well largely due to our focus on inventory control.

At the time we used integrated management software that included an inventory control (IC) module. What made our system work so well was our commitment to keeping accurate inventory on a real-time basis, which necessitated "cycle counting."

Wikipedia.org defines a cycle count as "an inventory management procedure where a small subset of inventory is counted on any given day." In our case, this meant that, instead of taking a physical inventory once a year, we counted 2% (one-fiftieth) of our inventory each week up to the fiftieth week of the year. Using this method errors are caught more quickly, and extra counts can be performed on error-prone items.

With that introduction, let's talk about the steps you can take to get your inventory under control:

1. Evaluate your IC "infrastructure." 
2. Set a target for customer service level. 
3. Learn industry norms to aid perspective.
4. Use "best practices.
5. Clean house! 
6. Implement "Just-in-Time. 
7. Zero-base SKUs. 
8. Partner strategically. 

 You can view details here: 

- Magento Inventory Management  -