Inventory management is an essential process for any business, like yours, that handles and sells physical products. To ensure there’s always enough inventory to meet customer demand while minimising unnecessary expenditure, you have to track, order, and maintain your inventory levels thoroughly.
Amongst ERP software, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central stands out as one of top choices for assisting small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) like yours in streamlining your inventory management proceses.
In this blog post, we’ll look at five hacks that you can apply to Business Central to make inventory management much easier, and more efficient for you.
If You're Having Issues Managing Your Warehouse, Take A Look At Our Guide To Warehouse Inventory Management Systems And Best Practices Here.
1. Adjust Your Inventory Levels With The Item Journal
Item Re-evaluation in Dynamics 365 Business Central ; Source: GoDigit
Business Central comes with the Item Journal feature, which allows your warehouse employees to easily adjust your business’s inventory levels in connection with purchases and sales, as well as positive or negative adjustments.
This allows you to quickly adjust any numbers in your inventory to reflect changes in your stock levels that happened for any reason, such as damaged goods, stock transfers to other locations, or product returns from your customers.
You can also use the Item Journal to track inventory adjustments that have been made, to get a comprehensive overview of how you’ve been managing your inventory levels over time.
2. Optimise Inventory Replenishment With Sales And Inventory Forecasting
Sales and inventory forecasting in Dynamics 365 Business Central, Source: goms tech talks
Making sure you have enough product on hand to meet consumer demand, without tying up too much capital in surplus, is one of the main issues in inventory management. With the Sales and Inventory Forecast extension, Business Central can help you strike the proper balance by providing you with information on future demand and inventory requirements.
The Sales and Inventory Forecast extension helps you avoid shortages in your inventory by using Azure AI to predict your future sales volume, based on your sales history. It can also make suggestions on when you should replenish your inventory of certain items in your inventory.
For example, if you create a purchase order from a vendor for an item that you’d like to add to your inventory, the extension could forecast that your business will soon run out of inventory for another item you regularly stock from the same vendor, and suggest that you also restock on that item as well.
3. Use Reorder Points To Automate Restocks Of Popular Items
Setting up reordering policies on items in Dynamics 365 Business Central; Source: Use Dynamics
Running out of stock for a popular item in your inventory can have an undesirable impact on the bottom line of your business. Therefore, you want to use reorder points to avoid this scenario.
In Business Central, you can set up reordering policies on your items to automatically create purchase orders whenever the stock levels of an item in your inventory drop below a predefined level.
This not only saves you time you might otherwise have needed to spend on reordering from your vendors and suppliers manually, it also guarantees that your business always have adequate inventory on hand to satisfy customer demand for your most popular items.
4. Make Order Fulfillment More Efficient With Pick And Ship
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Pick and ship items from a sales order in Dynamics 365 Business Central, Source: Microsoft
A crucial part of inventory management is order fulfillment. When a consumer puts an order, you must be able to promptly and accurately select the items from inventory and ship them to the customer. The Pick and Ship function in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central will assist you in streamlining this procedure.
You can select items from inventory and ship them to customers all at once using the Pick and Ship tool. This is how it operates:
- Choose the items: The Pick and Ship functionality creates a pick list when an order is received. This list indicates which products must be taken from stock to complete the order. It is simple to pick items effectively because to the pick list's ability to be sorted by location.
- Confirm the pick: The Pick and Ship tool will ask you to confirm that the right things have been picked once the items have been selected. By doing this, errors are minimized and the consumer receives the right goods.
- Ship the items: The Choose and Ship tool creates a packing list and mailing label after the pick has been confirmed. In a single step, the items can be packaged and delivered to the consumer.
You may decrease errors, increase customer happiness, and save time by using the Pick and Ship option. Orders may be filled more quickly and properly by streamlining the process, which can boost customer loyalty and boost sales.
5. For Effective Warehouse Management, Use Tasklet Factory’s Mobile WMS
Optimizing Your Warehouse With Mobile WMS from Tasklet Factory; Source: Tasklet Factory
How effectively you manage your warehouse operations has a direct impact on how efficient your inventory management process is as well. A well-designed warehouse layout, with different items stored in their respective bin locations, greatly eases the picking, packing and shipping process for your warehouse employees, and makes fulfilment of customer orders more efficient as well.
Consider integrating Tasklet Factory's Mobile WMS with Business Central for your warehouse management needs. With Mobile WMS, you can use your smartphones and tablets to scan barcodes on the physical items in your warehouse, allowing you to carry out inventory management operations without needing standalone barcode scanning hardware.
This means that, with a mobile device alone, your warehouse employees can;
- Scan barcodes on your items to carry out inventory processes - including receiving, picking, and shipping -
- View current inventory levels and bin locations of specific items in your warehouse
- Carry out cycle counts and other inventory-related duties.
With Mobile WMS, you can greatly reduce the time needed for inventory counting, achieve greater accuracy at the same time, and ensure the inventory count in Business Central is updated in real time with the stock levels that's actually in your warehouse.
Take Your Inventory Management To The Next Level With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
Any business that deals in physical goods requires efficient inventory management to be effective. If your business is currently using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, you can make use of the hacks discussed to achieve this.
With the ERP software, you can adjust your inventory as needed with the Item Journal, optimise your inventory replenishment processes with sales and inventory forecasting as well as the use of reorder points, make order fulfilment more efficient with Pick and Ship, and bolster your warehouse management processes by integrating Tasklet Factory’s Mobile WMS.
These hacks help you save time, minimise your expenses, and improve your decisions when it comes to managing the inventory of your business.
To find out more about how you can make use of Business Central and Tasklet Factory's Mobile WMS to further optimise your inventory management, you can drop us a note here.
Alternatively, take a look at how Q Industries resolved their issues with Business Central and Mobile WMS by clicking on the image below.
