5 strategies to reduce wasted inventory in your warehouse

What happens in your warehouse doesn't stay in the warehouse. It impacts your bottom line.

Wasted inventory is costly and can quickly hamper the efficiency of your business operations. To help you out, here are five strategies to help you stop writing off your wasted inventory.

1. Know what you have in your warehouse at any time with real-time inventory tracking

If you're stuck with mountains of wasted inventory and need help determining where it's all going, consider implementing real-time inventory tracking functionality. With this capability, you can:

• Keep tabs on what's in your warehouse at any given moment, ensuring you don't over-purchase and end up with extra inventory that goes to waste.
• Catch inventory before it spoils and becomes damaged, giving you an accurate baseline to measure how much you're wasting.
• Stop losing products in the depths of your warehouse or forgetting where you stashed those extra supplies.

2. Streamline inventory control processes

Nobody wants to be stuck with wasted inventory that's about to expire or has been recalled. When you streamline inventory processes, you can: 

• Ensure accurate inventory numbers and count the most important inventory as much as you needed with need automatically generated systemic cycle count jobs.
• Adjust your production or promotion schedules so you can use or sell that inventory before it spoils.

3. Enhance your receiving and quality assurance (QA) processes

Your supply chain is only as strong as your partners. Hold your suppliers accountable with extensive quality assurance checks and systems receiving processes so you can: 

• Ensure only good inventory makes it into your warehouse.
• Charge back vendors for mistakes or eliminate problematic vendors with automated vendor infraction tracking.
• Help your inventory control team focus on the most important inventory with automated Slack, email or text alerts for QA failures like spoilage, mold, evidence of pests, water damage and more.

 4. Boost efficiency in your allocation and picking processes

Make sure the right inventory is flying off the shelves. When you streamline your allocation and picking process, you can: 

• Ensure the right inventory gets picked in a particular order, whether FEFO, FIFO or LIFO, with a composable allocation strategy based on product, vendor, inventory or customer attributes.
• Optimize your pickers' travel distances with batch/zone picking, pick walls and other processes. 
• Reduce picking errors by seamlessly incorporating your automation and goods-to-person systems without the need for separate middleware.

 5. Accurately plan demand, purchasing and production schedules

Know how much inventory you have in your complex ecosystem of partners, vendors and shippers. When you have accurate inventory position numbers, you can: 

• Eliminate over-purchasing and wasted inventory due to having the wrong inventory in your warehouse when you automatically connect to and sync all your demand and inventory data sources into one place.
• Plan what product to purchase and when by layering in custom forecasts.
• Avoid costly, rushed and expedited substitutions to support your production schedules because your regular inventory spoiled in the warehouse.
  

Reduce inventory waste. Elevate  efficiency. Boost profitability. 

Technology is your ally in your quest for operational excellence. When you embrace the new wave of supply chain technology, you can bolster your operations' resiliency, responsiveness and agility in the face of change.

Are you ready to regain control of your inventory operations? Contact PorterLogic today.