When your business scales rapidly or expands its territory, it adds strain to your supply chain. Needing additional production and storage facilities to accommodate growth is a great problem to have, but it’s a problem, nonetheless. Managing multiple locations strains supply chains and puts a premium on a supply inventory management system.
Systems that employ sophisticated inventory management technology enable production efficiencies and expedite order fulfillment by allowing your company to decentralize components and inputs, finished goods, maintenance, repair, and operations material inventories across your service area. Keeping these supplies close to factories and customers reduces shipping charges and delivery times.
Unfortunately, it also multiplies the logistical challenges you face. Storing critical spare machine parts, ensuring the right product mix at each location, shuttling material among plants and storage facilities, and managing turnover present tall orders. When it makes sense for your business to expand its warehousing capability to additional sites, third-party inventory management services might be the most economical option for minimizing carrying costs and guarding against stockouts and inventory obsolescence.
Whether you adopt a multiple-location supply inventory management system in-house or engage with an inventory logistics service, a cloud-based approach can ensure site synchronization and on-time delivery that will prove critical to maintaining a streamlined workflow.
Overcoming Growing Pains with an Inventory Management System
Supply inventory management systems give manufacturers and other businesses a full picture of their inventory levels. You need accurate, real-time visibility not only into how much of each SKU you own, whether they are located where they are supposed to be, and how fast you can get them to a different company facility when the need arises.
Businesses maintaining complex supply chains – and who isn’t, these days? – need end-to-end traceability of their products’ entire lifecycle from raw material sourcing to value-added activities to finished-product delivery. A top supply inventory management system solves many of the business alignment needs that accompany expansion into multiple locations:
- Centralized Inventory Tracking: Inventory management technology includes interactive dashboards that track inventory positioned at all company sites. This allows ordering and transfer decisions based on demand projections, lead times, facility capacity, and other factors that can shift without notice.
- Automatic Restocking: Knowing much strategic inventory and where critical spare parts are available on a site, regional, and enterprise level minimizes the need for expedited delivery and other costly services. Inventory management services can initiate stock reorders and relocations when counts fall to pre-set levels. You’ll have fewer delays and less need to actively monitor warehouse contents.
- Integrated Operations: Inventory management platforms continually update not only inventory levels but also the systems that integrate with it. All decision-makers and all programs will operate on the same current datasets, aligning ERP, CRM, point-of-sale, purchasing, and HR functions.
- Robust Performance Reports: Scheduling production, equipment maintenance, and order delivery can create logjams when you’re organizing across more than one manufacturing or storage facility encompassing hundreds of SKUs. You can program your supply inventory management system to predict optimal schedules based on incoming orders and recent inventory use.
- Cost Containment: Keeping multiple locations adequately supplied requires additional capital, but a digital supply inventory management will keep the shipping and labor costs under control. Instead of having suppliers drop off materials to each location, your inventory management application can bulk-order shipments to your largest and most central warehouse and manage cross-docking the needed quantities to their final destinations.
- Documentation and Compliance: Inventory management services and software keep track of all transactions, creating a trail of breadcrumbs you can follow to trace the source of any quality, billing, or productivity problems. Error-free recording of part numbers, invoice dates, and catalog references ensures granular, end-to-end accountability.
- Route Optimization: Inventory management technology extends to the entire supply chain to offer insights into workforce management, resource allocation, and freight efficiencies. This includes calculating supply routes and times to minimize the time manufacturing materials and finished goods spend on the road. Fast delivery improves fulfillment and full value realization for time-sensitive products.
Choosing a Supply Inventory Management System
SDI’s comprehensive ZEUS supply chain optimization platform includes a powerful supply inventory management system. ZEUS right-sizes spare parts and input component supplies to keep carrying costs, freight charges, and overhead expenses under control while maximizing internal service levels.
ZEUS seamlessly syncs inventory levels across all your locations to ensure you receive the full benefits from interfacility transfers, customer service improvements, automatic cycle counts, and performance analytics. It incorporates all the inventory management services and benefits modern manufacturers, distributors, and commercial businesses need:
- Scalability: As companies expand their warehouse and production footprint, inventory tracking can grow fuzzy, and data tends to fragment into silos across the organization. But a scalable supply inventory management system ensures you have the insight and information you need to make smart decisions. Zeus delivers granular and enterprise-wide historical data and prediction engines that enable data-driven strategies. Standardized integration protocols expedite new facility onboarding, so your company can expand without disrupting existing operations. or requiring extensive retraining.
- Integration: Adding warehouse and production facilities complicates the movement not only of physical assets but of digital resources, as well. Back-office and information-processing bottlenecks, and costly reconciliation efforts multiply when some tech stack components cannot parse data generated by upstream components. Zeus connects disjointed systems, preserving your investment in legacy technology for continuity during expansion. SDI maintains Zeus’s ever-expanding API library that connects all leading ERP, WMS, accounting, and e-commerce platforms without the need for custom coding.
- Ease of Use: With Zeus’s modular design you can customize its functionality for each user and business location while aggregating statistics from all facilities. This preserves computational power and facilitates the middleware layer’s immediate data translation among diverse systems, Zeus is fluent in EDI, REST, SOAP and other industry-standard protocols to accommodate varied technology stacks. Like all SDI products and services, Zeus is vendor agnostic, which fosters gradual system migration, so you phase out legacy systems on a timeline that works for you without interrupting inventory visibility.
Explore how SDI’s cloud-based inventory management services can give you the visibility and control that multiple storage, manufacturing, and retail locations demand. Schedule a Zeus demonstration today.
