What is the general problem encountered in sales and inventory system?

Answer 1

The most common issues encountered are maintaining an accurate inventory. There is always an issue reconciling stock in and stock out as a miss count on delivery can throw the system a curve ball. Dealing with return of a product also has its issues as stock needs to be either be- returned and can go back in to the selling/supply route or returned and is not of a quality which will allow the product top be placed in the selling/supply route. However, this is frequently where miscounts occur as there is no track of the item once returned. Good inventory will allow the product to be - (a) scrapped and removed from site (b) Scrapped and awaiting removal to xyz destination - This is particularly important as many countries are now requiring organisations to monitor record and report waste disposal so recording this in an inventory systems is especially useful.

To balance the system it is also a positive to undertake mini stock counts on product groups, normally on a weekly basis this ensures that over a period of time stock holding is checked and accurate records made - Changes in volumes are them made as the year progresses. When a full audit is taken there are less major issues - Whilst this is a good practice many organisations fail to budget the process in and this leads to a poor accounting of the system - From a Sales perspective undertaking the aforementioned keep the sales team more informed - However, if you deal with date related products like food the it is even more essential that monitoring of stock rotation is observed as its a failing in many good company's even that staff will place lower coded products at the bottom/at the back of the storage area thus causing lost revenue and more importantly very unhappy customers who get the low and out of code products and the end of the supply chain.

Slot allocation is a very important factor within any inventory system. This is where a product is placed for the storage awaiting transfer to sales. In some circumstances a product, because of a high holding requirement may over spill to other areas of the storage area. These are missed and give the impression of lower stock levels than actually are there - again a good system will be able to have multiple storage locations associated with the products.