How Do Integrated Inventory Management Systems Benefit You?

Whether ordering raw materials or preventing bottlenecks in your production line, integrated inventory management systems provide you with high quality information to streamline your business, automate processes, and reduce costs. Carefully maintaining the cost of ordering, transporting, and storing inventory of raw materials and finished goods is absolutely critical to staying lean in these uncertain economic times.

Automation

Many inexpensive inventory softwares will help you automate your reordering and restocking processes. As product moves off your production line or out your dock door to be delivered to your customers, it is scanned and registered within the inventory management system. You can select an automatic reorder once inventory levels fall below your buffer as determined by the lead time of your suppliers. This helps you minimize the cost of storing raw materials and finished products inventory.

Pricing

As you begin to reduce your operational costs, you may find that you can extend these costs savings to your customers to further drive business and reach a greater market. Depending on your product and market, you may be able to lower your sales price to generate demand and sell to more customers. While this requires careful attention to customer demand and stock levels, it can effectively be integrated into your business strategy.

Identifying Inefficiencies

One of the biggest advantages of having a software solution in place to help you manage inventory is the access you will have to accurate, real-time data. This data can be modeled and manipulated to help you identify opportunities, areas for improvement, and potential threats to your business. Many inventory software solutions are operated from an incredibly user-friendly web portal. From here, reports can quickly and easily be generated to help you identify new opportunities.

A professional logistics consultant can be a great asset in integrating an inventory management system into your business. Visit PerimeterLogistics.com today to see how you can make the transition!

Does Your Operation Need a Contract Warehouse?

Many small business owners are effectively outsourcing greater and greater portions of their companies to create a ‘lifestyle business’ or entrepreneurial ‘muse.’ Essentially these business are bootstrapped at the lowest possible cost before operations are systemized and outsourced to create passive income for the business owner. One of the key steps in this process for businesses that sell physical products is to outsource distribution to a contract warehouse.

With a dedicated contract to a warehouse or fulfillment company, you can outsource all product handling and order fulfillment so that you can focus solely on growing your business. Most fulfillment houses are located centrally within your market to achieve the lowest possible delivery time to your most remote customers. Your warehousing partner can even manage inventory levels and reorder product straight from the manufacturer.

Orders can be received online and fulfilled by the competent and highly-trained warehousing staff. Delivery will then be scheduled for maximum cost effectiveness to the consumer. Should there be any problems with an order, most fulfillment operations offer a customer service department to handle complaints.

Imagine not having to worry about or ever even physically see and touch your products. All operations regarding the movement of your products can be completely automated allowing you to focus on sales and strategy until even this can be outsourced. Contract warehouses are the ticket for making your passive income dreams happen.

Since they often serve multiple clients, a warehousing provider can significantly defray his costs and pass that savings on to each client. Outsourcing logistics is always far more cost-effective than attempting to build and maintain these same systems in house. A warehousing provider has already absorbed the costs of industrial space, labor, and security measures. They are often staffed with teams of highly educated transportation engineers who work together to increase the efficiency of operations, and provide world-class service to both their clients and their clients’ customers.

For more information on how you can use contract warehousing to outsource your product handling operations, click here now!

Temperature Controlled Trailers and Food Safety

Each day, more and more meals are consumed outside the home, necessitating the movement of millions of cases of produce and other food consumables to be delivered to restaurants, hospitals, and college campuses nationwide. Moving these highly perishable goods safely from the farm to your dinner plate requires a highly orchestrated network of transportation providers to move goods safely and prevent spoil or contaimination by pest or disease. Temperature controlled containers help food shippers maintain the best possible enviroment to keep food safe during storage and shipment.

Every company that moves food items has in place a complex system for ensuring consumer protection as per regulations set forth by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These agencies issue ‘best practices’ guidelines every year for everything from sanitation to packing to warehousing. All of these best practices in some way refer to a shippers ability to maintain a ‘cold’ supply chain. 

As you know from storing milk, cheese, eggs, meat and vegetables in your refrigerator, food items can be preserved in cold environments. Using refrigerated docks and temperature and humidity regulated containers, distribution companies are able to maintain a strict temperature and humidity profile to slow down the deterioration of food goods, create an inhospitable environment for bacteria, mold and fungi, and maintain inventory at its most pristine levels. Using temperature and humidity regulated trailers and containers provides a temperature controlled mobile storage solution to preserve goods no matter their destination.

Companies face the potentially crippling cost of legal settlements should someone become ill because food products were contaminated during shipment. However maintaining a pristine supply chain from farm to fork is a definite challenge. Climate controlled containers are simply the best way for food distributors and retailers to maintain the ‘cold’ chain and minimize risk of loss due to spoil, infestation or contamination.

Click here for more information on how climate regulated containers can help you keep your perishable goods safe during shipment or storage.