Inventory management is essential for keeping track of and managing the purchasing, selling, and storage of items, whether you are a factory selling raw materials as your products or a shop selling off-the-shelf stock.
Records show that most companies have trouble with unavailable supplies and delayed shipping. By choosing to optimize their inventory management, some people have also unlocked growth possibilities. For various businesses, there may be varied inventory management requirements and tactics. The goal remains the same, though: delivering the right quality at the right time while reducing excess stockouts or inventory.
Therefore, your organization will save time and money by using best practices. In response to this problem and in an effort to offer something helpful, Salesforce has stepped in with an inventory management feature that increases productivity and revenue for businesses.
This article will go through how using the Salesforce inventory management system may benefit your company and result in better customer service, stronger client relationships, and stronger data security.
What Justifies the Importance of Salesforce Inventory Management?
Let’s first talk about why a business should choose Salesforce inventory management.
Choosing to buy less may result in stockouts of goods that will satisfy your clients. We run the risk of building up outdated inventory when we buy less.
Therefore, knowing the proper quantity to order at the right time is essential for success. Real-time inventory data allows you to automate inventory management systems and predict analytics before preventing waste and spending money. You must use inventory visibility, the finest inventory management technique, to do this since it allows you to see the quality and flow of the items in real time. By doing this, brands can swiftly collect and retain massive amounts of data, match supply and demand, and lower the risk of overselling and underselling.
How to Adhere to Best Practices for Salesforce Inventory Management?
You need to understand how much you should order, how long it takes for your supply to run out, how much to reserve items, and when to reorder in order to benefit from Salesforce inventory management best practices.
Whatever industry your company operates in, the fundamental concepts will always apply. Best practices for inventory management, on the other hand, are distinct and depend on specific company requirements (since they can change depending on the industry).
Let’s look at a couple of industries as examples:
Salesforce Manufacturing Inventory Management
Manufacturers may experience problems with raw materials getting stopped in transportation. They experience shortages and delayed deliveries.
Here, employing best practices in inventory management aids them in the:
- production and delivery assurance on time,
- less expensive carrying costs,
- No materials are out of stock,
- Overproduction.
Healthcare Salesforce Inventory Management
Visibility is especially crucial in the healthcare industry when vital supplies are discovered to be out of date, missing, out of stock, or back-ordered. Providers are simultaneously under pressure to manage waste and prevent abuse or theft.
Using a digital inventory management system with a supply chain that is well-connected and integrated, businesses can have total visibility into distribution, location, and consumption.
This assists with:
- Protects patients,
- Expenditure is limited, and
- Assures compassionate workers.
Using Salesforce for Food Industry Inventory
For a food company, manually tracking inventory might be challenging. In this situation, an efficient inventory management system can be very helpful in running the food business profitably.
Incorporating the salesforce inventory management system with the food industry can:
- Observe stock levels,
- lessen waste, and
- Ensure the intake of fresh and safe products.
Using Salesforce for Nonprofit Inventory Management
Salesforce inventory management is increasingly being used by nonprofits to expand their demands and deliver the required results.
Other advantages of inventory management for nonprofits include:
- Management of donated inventory items with minimal user interaction
- Easily see, add, and remove items
- Facilitate user access control, and
- Sort donations according to location.
Retail and e-commerce inventory management with Salesforce
When popular products run out of stock, retailers frequently have problems. They can receive a good return on investment from the stock they purchase by using best practices for inventory management.
A visible inventory management system aids in knowing the current status of the supplies on hand, and retailers are aware of the profitable finished goods, whether they are the best or worst sellers.
- Broad awareness enables retailers.
- Connect to a location to examine sales, warehouse, and distribution data.
- simplify client interactions, and
- Improve ROI.
The Best Methods for Using Salesforce to Leverage Inventory Management Systems
The next concern would be how to utilize Salesforce for inventory management to its fullest potential. Here, we’ve laid out a number of options for you to consider.
Personalized Development
You can develop a custom inventory management solution utilizing the Salesforce platform if your company has certain inventory management needs. You may create unique workflows, items, and reports for inventory tracking and management within Salesforce thanks to its powerful customization and development capabilities.
Custom Fields and Objects
On the Salesforce platform, you may create unique objects and fields to keep track of inventory-related data management. For warehouses, products, and inventory transactions, you can create custom objects as needed.
Integration with a third-party inventory control system
The ideal way to maintain inventory, fulfill orders, and manage stock is to integrate Salesforce with an outside inventory management system. By doing this, you can sync inventory data between the two systems, ensuring that Salesforce has the latest information and that its inventory levels are accurate.
Dashboards and Reports
You can access metrics that are pertinent to inventory with Salesforce’s powerful reporting and dashboard features. Additionally, you may construct reports and dashboards that provide insights into the needs for replenishment, order fulfillment, sales success, and inventory levels. Making wise decisions about inventory management is aided by this.
AppExchange Applications
Finding the best inventory management tools to integrate with your CRM platform and expand its capability for inventory management is best done through the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace for third-party apps and integrations. Stock replenishment, warehouse management, order management, and inventory tracking are functions that these apps offer. To fulfill your needs for inventory management, you must find and select the ideal app.
How a Real-Time Inventory Management System Can Be Implemented to Help?
Improved visibility results from using real-time inventory management within an organization.
- Having more visibility makes buying in bulk more affordable in terms of storage.
- Analyse product demand using embedded analytics to make timely purchases.
- Overstocks, out-of-stocks, incorrect shipments, and incorrect choices are high-value hazards that are reduced through automated reporting and reordering.
As a result, you’ll be able to keep your shelves stocked, deliver goods accurately and swiftly, increase customer satisfaction, and draw in repeat customers.
Salesforce CRM supports tracking and updating inventory consumption, shipments, transfers, and returns by holding the Field Service package, a component of Salesforce’s Service Cloud module. This guarantees that field service professionals have access to the appropriate equipment whenever required and keep clients informed.
leading characteristics of Salesforce inventory management
Salesforce has developed into a potent platform for managing both customer and inventory connections. A user of Salesforce for inventory management might anticipate the following key features:
Track Items in Various Places
To receive updates on the number of things in a certain area, consumers can create records for their products and set up locations. Using a barcode scanner, the company’s workers may update the inventory in real-time by scanning the barcodes on the components and equipment. The Product Item Transactions list allows the owner to view the modifications.
Track transfers and returns
You may monitor the movement of items from a third-party vendor to an inventory place as well as between warehouses and other types of storage at various locations by using Salesforce inventory management tools.
To transport the things, you can establish a product transfer and provide the source location, destination location, source product item, and source quantity.
Additionally, you may follow the shipping information for transfer, make a shipment, and mark it as “received” when the items arrive.
You can keep track of any merchandise that is returned and make return orders that include the pertinent case, product, or order.
Establish Reorders
A new product request must be created in order to connect stock that is about to run out with related orders, locations, line items, and accounts. For each product requested, create a line item in your accounting system.
Scheduling
By dynamically allocating appointments and jobs based on skills, time, and location, a smart scheduling solution from Salesforce is excellent at optimizing the allocation of your mobile workforce. A number of instruments are also available to follow trucks, machinery, and crews in order to verify the availability of the necessary components and resources.
Analytics
Real-time information on employees’ performance is provided by the analytics feature. You can benefit from it by combining customer data from many platforms and using it to spot problems, plan operations in advance, and come up with remedies.
Conclusion
By analyzing your company’s needs and choosing the most effective method for effective inventory management, you can take advantage of Salesforce’s capability for procedures related to inventory.
For this, you may either employ custom development to acquire inventory management quality inside the Salesforce ecosystem or integrate your company with the best inventory management solutions.