Inventory is a complex and costly aspect of many businesses. Mismanagement of inventory can easily become the difference between profit and loss–understanding your situation fully is crucial for a business owner.

The challenges surrounding inventory management don’t stop at tracking the physical aspects of your inventory–it’s also important to understand how the movement of inventory in your business affects costs of all kinds. Some costs are measured in intangibles like customer satisfaction. Other costs involve employee morale, vendor relationships, and lost opportunities.

Xcellerated Solutions can help with all aspects of Inventory Management, especially with helping in developing an environment where you can achieve:

• Inventory is expensive to buy, expensive to ship, and expensive to hold. When you lack visibility into other less tangible or track able factors (like the costs associated with out of stock situations, information problems, shrinkage, expiration dates, tax implications, and lot tracking), it becomes difficult to make good decisions that optimize costs and encourage spending more when wise.
• The problem isn’t usually information availability–the problem is UNDERSTANDING the information available…
• Xcellerated Solutions can help with developing reports, alerts, pivot tables, BI dashboards, and other tools to help you understand and fine-tune your decision making processes. These are typically not canned reports–they are molded to your situation, the needs and abilities of your vendors/customers/partners, and delivered when and how they can be most useful. A 30% reduction in tangible costs is conservative when implementing better decision tools–the intangible benefits are often much more profound.

• One of the biggest challenges of making inventory decisions is finding the best timing. Often one or two variables (like price or delivery time) are used to plan orders, but there are other variables that carry costs that easily outweigh the convenience or price points offered. What are the variables, how can we use the variables to make decisions, and how can we estimate costs appropriately?
• The problem isn’t usually information availability–the problem is UNDERSTANDING the information available…
• Your team knows your situation well–they can likely identify many of the real variables in play. Xcellerated Solutions has deep experience (along with tools and tricks) that can give you better understanding of your situation. In addition to helping you better analyze, anticipate, and plan with the data you already have, we can help you with ways to modify your existing workflows to improve your data collection and reporting abilities.

• If you’re only processing a few purchase orders for a few products per month, you can probably track your history and planning on a spreadsheet. If you are in a situation where your sales orders trigger production requirements, things get a lot more complex. The sheer volume of data to track in organizations without good planning tools usually means guess work and reactionary emergency mode situations.
• The problem isn’t usually information availability–the problem is UNDERSTANDING the information available…
• As experts in inventory management systems and tools, Xcellerated Solutions understands the complexities of the software engines that make these predictions. We’ve also found that MRP engines often fall short and lack the ability to sufficiently model your decision-making scenarios. In these cases, we can build custom engines that often result in spreadsheet, pivot table, or BI-based tools that let you play with data results to make the best decisions.

• Anytime humans are responsible for editing, creating, or updating data, it’s important to implement every possible safeguard to prevent errors from introducing expensive or embarrassing problems. Attention gaps, skill gaps, and attitude problems all contribute to inventory problems.
• The problem isn’t related to the people–the problem is EMPOWERING the people to not make mistakes…
• By having an automated Inventory Management and Warehouse Management system, you make it difficult for people to make permanent mistakes. By using inventory tracking (like barcodes or RFID) and feedback mechanisms WHEN the mistake occurs (utilizing screens and sound while blocking progress on the workflow until the error is corrected), human mistakes are naturally and dramatically reduced. Costs are reduced. Morale improves. Efficiency improves.
• Xcellerated Solutions can help you imagine or re-imagine your inventory and warehouse environment to help you build high-confidence systems.

• With modern ERP and Inventory Management and reporting tools, there’s never been a better time to see your reports anywhere you are–on any device. Whether it’s KPI reports or dashboards, transactional research, or transaction authorizations, the built-in capabilities of the software we work with are incredible.
• The problem isn’t usually information availability–the problem is UNDERSTANDING the information available…
• Xcellerated Solutions has the experience, talent, and resources to help you ensure your reporting is dialed in to your needs–we specialize in real-time access with user manipulatable results. XS will also help you ensure that your remote-access capabilities are secure and available.