At one stop in my accounting career, I was the controller at a hardwood flooring distributor. It was my first taste of inventory control and the etiquette of proper warehouse management. This was twenty years ago, way before automation and the strategic concept of supply chain management that we understand today.

 

All about balance

I learned quickly we had two types of items in our warehouse; those that sold routinely and were in constant demand, and those that just took up space and no hope of being sold during routine business operations.

Fast forward to 2021, and supply chain management has become an exact science. It is all about balance. Finding the right combination of alignment to your current demand by procuring the exact amounts needed. Unfortunately, that balance can be tricky to determine. If you are understocked, you might:

  • Missed sales opportunities.
  • Provide poor customer service.
  • Pay extra freight and delivery to expedite items.
  • Labor and delivery cost of constantly moving inventory between warehouses.

On the other side, being overstocked has its pitfalls as well:

  • Increase rent and handling costs (this always reminds me of doing physical counts and see the count tags from the previous two or three years of counting).
  • Stale products cluttering space.
  • Deep discounts to clear out merchandise can kill COGS.

 

So how do you find that balance?

Microsoft Business Central (BC) has an excellent tool to help you maneuver through the minefield of procurement.

BC will completely automate this process for your business. BC does this by analyzing upcoming sales commitments, current inventory levels, and anticipated safety levels you set in advance.

So instead of opening a new excel workbook to compile and tabulate hundreds of open sales orders and then walk through your warehouse to determine what needs to be ordered, you would let BC do the work.

The solution will analyze all open obligations in the days or weeks ahead, a create and detailed purchasing plan. Once reviewed and approved, that plan can easily be converted into the proper purchase orders and be emailed directly to your suppliers.

 

In short, let BC do all the work, so you can focus on the more important things, like managing your business.

 

To learn more about how we can help with supply chain automation, Contact Us and feel free to connect on LinkedIn and Twitter! If you’re interested in more articles on Business Central check out our blog Top 3 New Features for Business Central – 2021 Wave 1