Every eCommerce fulfillment stage is equally vital and should be treated as such if you want your packages to reach your customers. However, last-mile delivery often receives the most attention due to its importance, complex implementation, and hard-to-solve logistical issues.
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Safety stock is the number of products a business keeps on hand as a buffer to prevent stockouts. At least, that is the basic definition. But we can better illustrate what it means by using an analogy.
It’s like how your body keeps a little bit of fat on hand to burn off when food becomes scarce. A business, just like a body, shouldn’t accumulate too much fat because that can lead to all sorts of health problems. You need to find a healthy balance between gorging and starving. That is just common sense.
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When you take stock of your inventory, you have to have a physical count of everything you have on hand. This way, you can figure out if there is any discrepancy, which items you need to reorder, or if you need to do a stock adjustment. Instead of just doing that, right now we’re going to take stock of your inventory management. That means we’re going to delve into how you’re currently managing your inventory and dive into how to take stock. Then we’ll see what’s working and what needs to be fixed to make your company even more successful.
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Fishbowl is a true inventory control solution, which gives you advanced features to control many aspects1 of your business. Those aspects include your inventory, manufacturing, orders, and costs. Let’s talk about some of the specific inventory control features Fishbowl offers to help you take control of these critical components of your growing company. You might be surprised at the expansive benefits you’ll enjoy by implementing the following functionality.
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Are you better off bulk ordering or only purchasing what is necessary to meet your current needs, as in a just in time (JIT) setup? There are advantages and drawbacks to each order management strategy.
You’ll often receive a bulk discount on pricing for reaching a high threshold of items in one order from wholesalers or retailers, and you’ll save money on shipping and delivery fees. But you’ll also have higher carrying costs, more money tied up in inventory, and the potential for product spoilage if it sits on the shelf for too long. When you order smaller quantities instead of bulk purchasing, you will avoid unnecessary storage costs and be able to run a leaner warehouse. However, you need to have incredible precision in your inventory data because you risk running out of items if you order too few, and you will likely have higher shipping and delivery costs as you place more orders over time.
I’d like to share two personal experiences from my life that allude to the dangers of going to one extreme or the other, and the need for finding a healthy balance in your ordering strategy, whether you choose to order smaller or bulk quantities.
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While NetSuite is a full ERP and Fishbowl is an inventory management solution, Fishbowl nonetheless stacks up surprisingly well compared to NetSuite. You can see that comparison on the Fishbowl vs. NetSuite page. The chart briefly matches up the two solutions based on the following criteria:
Fishbowl and NetSuite are equally capable of accomplishing the first eight criteria, but Fishbowl outshines NetSuite in the final four. Keep in mind that some things are referred to by different names in each solution. For example, Fishbowl calls the assembly of new products manufacturing and NetSuite calls it production. Let’s go more in depth on each of these bullet points to specifically show their similarities and differences.
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Most companies don’t focus on the putaway process because it isn’t as obviously tied to revenue or business operations as fulfillment. That means lots of time and money spent on optimizing pick and pack, without thinking about how putaway prepares goods and teams to operate at their peak.
The initial placement of goods in your warehouse matters. When it’s done right, it makes every other process faster and easier. So, your goal for the second half of 2020 should be to optimize this putaway process to keep things running smoothly and potentially improve your margins. There are a few different options and requirements for it, but they all tend to pay off well.
Here, we’ll break down our optimization thoughts into three phases:
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This is a guest blog post written by Will Schneider with insightQuote.com
Fulfillment and shipping is a critical aspect of the supply chain function. From one-day deliveries to the increased desire for free shipping, customer expectations are driving companies to not only provide exceptional logistics services but also leverage the fulfillment function as a source of competitive advantage. These increasing demands are causing more and more companies to look outside their own warehouse walls to pursue 3PL outsourcing. In fact, 66 percent of companies use outsourcing, according to the Current State of 3PL Market 2016 Study.
The potential benefits of outsourcing are many – improved flexibility, quality, and responsiveness, access to new markets, increased speed to market, decreased customer response time, and decreased costs, not to mention time savings from not performing the function in-house. But is outsourced fulfillment the right solution for your business? In this article, we’ll walk you through the decision-making process to help you determine if this avenue is the right fit for your company.
There are many factors to consider when deciding whether to keep the fulfillment side of your business in-house or whether you should outsource this part to another company. Before jumping into the financial aspects to see if cost savings will be achieved, it’s important to take a look at some key strategic reasons that might deter you from taking this course of action.
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“Fishbowl may be a niche-filler, but it’s no weakling stopgap measure,” says Pam Baker in her review of Fishbowl on SmallBusinessComputing.com. “The popular inventory management add-on for QuickBooks does a commendable job keeping inventory assets in full view and on the move for small businesses.”
She does a great job covering Fishbowl’s features and explaining inventory management concepts, so I’ll let her do most of the talking in this blog post and throw in my two cents as needed.
Baker is a much more prolific writer than me. She’s written for newspapers like The New York Times and Knight Ridder, magazines like ComputerWorld and Institutional Investor, and websites like CIO.com. She’s been around the block, digitally speaking. So it’s no surprise that she has a lot of interesting things to say about Fishbowl.
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In the blog post “The Quest for the Perfect Inventory Management Software,” we were hunting for the best solution to our inventory management needs. Now we’ll finish our search and talk about how to find the right solution, not just look for it.
There are two main criteria you should look at to find the best inventory management software: 1. what it does for you, and 2. what features you expect from it.
A great way to tell if inventory management software is right for you is if it produces the results you’re looking for. What are you looking for? Let’s talk about several things that should be high on your list.
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