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The opportunity to take inventory begins weeks or even long before your physical intake, particularly with respect to the last inventory of each year. Taking inventory is not an impulse to know the stock of a warehouse, however, it is a designed job that needs planning and order. Here are 10 basic tips to prevent inventory management from failing:
1. Separate your stocks
It is necessary to have specific areas for each type of inventory: raw material, merchandise in process and finished merchandise. Before continuing the counting plan and handing over all the work to inventory management company in India, confirm that each item is in its proper warehouse.
2. Sort your stocks by item type
As an example, in a raw materials warehouse of an organization that produces footwear, specific areas should be determined for skins, soles, glues, etc. It should be borne in mind that the storage of volatile, flammable and/or dangerous goods must be carried out by qualified personnel who guarantee their correct treatment.
At this point, you must perform 2 activities that are of great importance: verify that the merchandise is finished, obsolete and/or broken and verify that the packages contain what they claim to contain and are not empty boxes.
Once these tasks are completed, the company’s administrators and/or accounting advisers should be consulted about what administrative and legal treatment is given to these inventory losses.
3. Group similar items
When the product is classified by type of article, each specific article must be analyzed, confirming that different items are not grouped and that there are no articles scattered in different areas.
4. Establish units and counting methodology
This perspective that seems to be so clear sometimes has its entanglements or can be seen by completely different optics. The important thing is to decide on a uniform and consistent unit of measurement, to avoid an individual counting liters and other gallons, for the same item, or for a group to “use” eight hours to count an item that is not so relevant.
5. Check returned or unconfirmed items
Many organizations have explicit zones where they keep customer returns or unverified purchases “on hold” before placing them in the appropriate warehouse. Check that this area is not full and that there are no pending items to incorporate in the corresponding shelves.
6. Verify internal movements and pending deliveries
The internal movements of inputs, like the sale of the final merchandise to customers, must be discarded a minimum of 2 days before the count, verifying that there is nothing in transit between the departments or undelivered sales.
7. Use counting labels or implement barcode readers
When you have sorted each of your stocks by type, model, and size, and you have defined all the counting units, the counting labels should print. It is appropriate to explain that this step is not important for organizations that have barcode readers, RFID readers, or other automated information gathering systems, where stock capture is done through optical systems.
The counting labels must be produced by the stock management software and it is an amazing opportunity to see that all things are incorporated into the system. They will have an original and a copy and must be placed with adhesive tape on each of the items handled by the inventory management firm.