Is your rental business operating across multiple locations? While stock management across multiple locations can offer many benefits such as a larger customer base and market, it also comes with a unique set of challenges.
One key challenge is maintaining optimal stock levels of rental inventory at all your locations. It is necessary to increase stock levels when a business is growing into different markets. However, carrying too much stock ties up capital or running short on inventory means losing on sales and customers. A balanced inventory level helps you meet demand while also controlling costs for the business.
What Is Multi-Location Inventory Management?
Multi-location inventory management is a continuous process of streamlining warehouse operations, forecasting re-order stock points and efficiently managing deliveries to customers on time. Well managed stock across locations is extremely advantageous for your business. Here’s how:
1. Reallocate To Meet Multi-Location Demand
As a stock manager, you can easily identify stocks that are in excess at one location and it can be redistributed to another location to fulfill orders elsewhere. This re-shuffling can avoid stacking up high inventory levels at one location when demands are low.
2. Seamless Shipping and Shipping Costs
Shipping inventories from a single warehouse to a long-distance location is a time-consuming process, and a delay in shipping means dissatisfied customers. With warehouses located near high demand locations, you can easily ship on time to local customers. It also lowers shipping costs by reducing the delivery distances.
3. Organized Warehouses
A good stock management strategy keeps the warehouses organized. The best selling products in easily accessible places in the warehouse makes order process quicker and creates happy customers.
How Can Inventory Stock Management Software Benefit Your Business
Managing multiple warehouses manually is time consuming and prone to human error. Here’s how an inventory stock management software can help streamline your inventory at multiple locations:
1. Real Time Visibility and Synchronization
The software provides you real time visibility into how much stock is available at a given location at any given time. You can import inventory files directly from Excel and fill in important inventory details such as inventory number, initial stock quantity, reorder quantity and price of stock.
A stock manager can view all warehouse statistics at one glance with dashboard visibility. This enables businesses to closely track key metrics via a snapshot view of all inventory-related activities. Set KPIs for total inventory sold, low inventory or inventory reservations and always stay on top of statistics that matters to you.
2. Set Safety Stock Levels and Reorder Points
A crucial part of inventory management is setting safety stock levels. Inventory levels hitting the safety stock point is where a manager needs to reorder stocks to keep meeting future rental durations.
It is easy to set default stock thresholds in your inventory stock management software. You can use this capability to set a default minimum and maximum value for specific locations. If the stock falls below or exceeds the set threshold, you’ll get an alert about the changed quantities. You can even set custom thresholds for your locations depending on the unique needs of that particular market. This gives you powerful control to fully optimize the stock held at multiple locations.
Read more about Setting Quantity Thresholds for Locations here
3. Optimize Warehouse Layout
In a manual setup, additional warehouses will require more labor to keep inventory levels in an appropriate workstation. A well-managed warehouse is important for business success since it eventually translates to on-time deliveries and satisfied customers.
An inventory stock management software can grow with your business as you scale it up to different locations and expand your inventory. Cloud platforms are easy to set up without additional IT and labor requirements. You can simply upgrade your rental package to utilize advanced features depending on your warehouse, team size, or inventory levels.
You can easily manage inventory levels at multiple warehouses on a cloud-based platform as well as track orders to restock and to maintain required stock levels. The platform also allows you to set multiple locations and efficiently view and manage stocks across them.
Here are 5 ways Your Rental Business Can Save Time and Money with Cloud Warehouse Management
4. Access and Training for Team Members
Training your members about effective inventory management can help in understanding different situations better and reduce errors. Duplication of inventory counts and unnecessary handling of inventory leads to task redundancy and loss of productive working hours.
Members trained according to assigned job descriptions can help align tasks for each member. With the help of an inventory stock management software, you can also assign different roles for members providing them just the right amount of access to manage stock efficiently.
With robust knowledge of cloud inventory management and hands-on experience about warehouse layout, employees can feel confident in performing their tasks and help streamline inventory management processes.
5. Business Insights
A rental business can gain a competitive edge with informed understanding of supply and demand. This can help in better forecasting sales trends at various locations.
Inventory stock management software can equip you with reports needed to make strategic decisions. You can run monthly, semi-annual or annual reports on each of your locations to gauge performance. You can extract information on profit margins, inventory sold and revenue streams from different locations. You can even filter results by customer or orders to see which location is generating more profits.
All this complex data can also be transformed into insightful, easy-to-understand graphs. Reports aid in turning statistics into business strategies. An efficient inventory management report with relevant trends can facilitate balanced stock levels and accurate reorder points.
For more information on Managing Rentals Across Different Rental Business Locations, click here
About EZRentOut
EZRentOut, a cloud-based equipment rental software can help. EZRentOut offers companies in numerous industries seamless rental management along with a host of other features. You can integrate your website with our EZR plug to keep track of all your rental Assets and operations. Try us out today!
