Which of your products should you offer on special? Which should be marked up? How should you bid on that major RFP received by your sales team? If you can’t answer these types of questions in a matter of minutes, you’re falling behind competitors who manage inventory with better ERP systems.
Using modern ERP, businesses gain real-time views into inventory, including the location of every item, SKU churn rates, purchase cost, current market cost, and more. Additionally, everyone in the company is making decisions based on the same set of data, with that data being more accurate than ever.
How Modern ERP Optimizes Inventory Knowledge
Modern ERP systems, including SAP Business One and Macola M10, were designed to incorporate inputs from all your teams ─ sales, the warehouse, purchasing, finance, etc. ─ so you have a complete view of your inventory, including bin-level and location data about each SKU as well as objective insights into which SKUs are hot and which are not.
At their core, these ERP systems store all item-related data (no matter what it is) in a single database shared across the organization. To ensure that data is meaningful and provides complete context for each user, ERP provides intuitive workflow tools that establish and enforce processes for your staff to follow. This means you can establish processes around every action required to purchase, receive, store, move, sell, and deliver your products. Enforcing workflows and processes ensures that everyone remains updated with the latest product availability and location data.
Consider this common scenario: one of your inside sales team professionals identifies an opportunity to sell twenty units of an SKU, ten of which must be delivered within three days and the other ten a week later. Using ERP with bin-level tracking and shared information with the logistics team, not only can your sales professional ‘click’ into several information screens to see if enough SKUs are available, he can also rapidly quote the shipping terms and prices to charge the customer as well. This is a vast improvement over the typical ‘hair-on-fire’ responses common with companies lacking modern ERP, where the salesperson wastes an entire day gathering data that might be only 50% accurate. Which company would you rather be?
For more information about modern ERP, please contact us today.
