“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” and for manufacturers, the weight of inventory management is no less daunting – the complexities of tracking raw materials, forecasting demand for finished goods, maintaining optimal work-in-progress (WIP) levels, and synchronizing supply chain operations that lead to stockouts, costly overstocking, and inefficiencies.
Adding to this, the challenges of managing multi-location warehouses, addressing production delays, and adhering to compliance standards evidently talk about the need to switch to a modern inventory management model from a traditional inventory management system. As a manufacturing business with growing modern needs, you put your operations, production, deadlines, profitability, and efficiency at risk without a robust inventory management solution.
Acumatica is one of the most sought-after ERPs in the market and a game-changer in inventory management for the manufacturing industry. Acumatica, as your inventory management software, offers a variety of tools and features for cloud-based inventory management with real-time insights – from available inventory to reorder quantities to inventory in transit to inventory costs and more.
However, there are more ways you can leverage the Acumatica inventory management.
So, are you ready to discover how Acumatica transforms inventory management into a competitive advantage?
Why Is Acumatica the Ultimate Choice for Inventory Management? – A Look into Its Features
| Location Management | Location Management | Physical Inventory | Pricing, Discounts, and Promotions | Customer and Vendor Items |
| Packaging and UOM | Shipments | Inventory Valuation | Kitting and Disassembly | Perishable Inventory and Lot/Serial Traceability |
| Two-Step Receipt Verification | Non-Stock Items | Dead Stock Detection | Turnover Inquiry | Stock Conversions |
| Role-Based Dashboards | Barcodes and Labels | Warehouse Transfers | Optional Quality Management | Side Panels |
What Are Some Key Inventory Management Challenges that Acumatica Addresses?
- Lack of Real-Time Inventory Visibility
Manufacturing businesses often experience errors and delays because of incomplete or outdated inventory data. This leads to missed delivery timelines and production bottlenecks. Acumatica ERP gives you real-time updates on inventory items and stock levels across all warehouses at any given time. With Acumatica, you can track items by their lot number, serial number, and even expiration date, ensuring the seamless monitoring of your inventory movement.
- Challenges in Predicting Demand Accurately
Manufacturing businesses with traditional inventory management systems face challenges in getting accurate demand forecasting. As a result, these businesses either scramble to source materials during shortages or tie up capital in excess inventory.
Acumatica can forecast your inventory needs and plan accordingly using historical data and demand trends. As a result, you can manage seasonal demand fluctuations, avoid overstocking or understocking, and adjust inventory levels.
- Complex Kitting and Assembly Processes
If you don’t have a proper tracking and allocation process in place, managing components for assemblies and kits becomes a task, leading to delays and production errors. Bills of Materials (BOM) and Kits feature in Acumatica allows you to manage kitted products and assemblies. With this feature, you can track inventory levels not just for individual products but also for final assembled products, facilitating accurate tracking of all materials.
- No/Limited Integration Capabilities with eCommerce and Third-Party Tools
As a modern cloud-based ERP system, Acumatica comes with robust integration capabilities, offering you the opportunity to integrate the ERP with an eCommerce platform or a third-party application. The integration brings your sales and operational data to one unified platform, allowing seamless workflows and order fulfillment.
- Limited Access to Actionable Insights & Reporting
Without robust reporting and analytics, manufacturing businesses lack the clarity to identify inefficiencies and make informed decisions. Dashboards in Acumatica are highly customizable, giving you real-time insight into key inventory metrics, such as turnover, inventory valuation, and aging inventory.
How Can You Manage Inventory Effectively with Acumatica?
- Centralizing Your Inventory Data
Having a centralized or a single source from which all your business data can be accessed is very important to get a clear picture of your inventory, sales, and purchases so that you can make informed decisions. In addition, centralization empowers consistency, reduces errors in data, and simplifies reporting.
Acumatica’s inventory module helps you achieve a centralized data source to manage all your inventory items, stock levels, and warehouses. Along with that, you need to regularly update inventory details like item info, pricing, and availability. You can also use attributes and categories for effective inventory management.
- Proactively Managing Lead Times
It is crucial to get access to accurate and up-to-date information in real time in order to make informed decisions. And Acumatica ensures just that for you with its Vendor Lead Time Reporting feature. With this, you get crucial information about vendor performance, including variance and lead times.
Now, you can review these reports to ensure proactive inventory management by evaluating the supplier’s reliability. You can identify which vendors are delaying their commitments and which ones are meeting them consistently.
- Prioritizing Your Inventory with ABC Analysis
If you’re considering all your inventory items the same or equal, that is what is holding you back. Your inventory items cannot be the same– size, quantity, weight, quality, or even value. Hence, it becomes crucial to prioritize your inventory items based on their value. ABC analysis technique helps you categorize your inventory items into three categories –
- High Value – items that are the most important, typically the most expensive, and should be managed with extra care and attention.
- Medium Value – items that are significantly important for your business success but not as much as items in category A.
- Low Value – items that are not as important for your business success.
Acumatica ERP helps you implement this inventory management module into your business to prioritize items that hold high importance for your business’s success. With Acumatica, you can allocate resources based on these categories and focus on optimizing items that lie under category A.
- Enabling Multi-Location Inventory Management
Multi-location inventory management can be a game-changer for your business. By leveraging Acumatica’s multi-location inventory feature, you can have the right products in the right place at the right time by managing multiple warehouses, distribution centers, and stores.
In addition, you can also track and manage stock levels at each warehouse independently. As a result, you can allocate resources where they are needed and can even transfer inventory between different locations as the demand shifts.
The multi-location feature comes in very handy in managing your inventory as it optimizes your inventory levels across different departments, preventing both excess stock storage and shortages at specific locations.
- Leveraging Inventory Reports and Dashboards
One of the key Acumatica inventory features is robust reporting and dashboards. With this feature, you can get various reports, including ABS Analysis, Inventory Valuation, and Inventory Turnover. Not only this, you can also get real-time visibility into your business data and inventory performance on Acumatica’s dashboards.
Using historical data and past sales patterns, you can ensure inventory forecasting in Acumatica. As a result, you can make informed purchasing decisions. Along with enhanced forecasting, you can also enjoy better insights into trends, customer demand, and seasonality.
- Using Barcodes and RFID
One of the modern ways of managing your inventory effectively is barcoding and RFID. And Acumatica, as ERP inventory management software, seamlessly supports these advanced features. Barcodes and RFID tags are faster and more accurate than manual entries.
To leverage these features, all you need is a handheld device to scan barcodes during receiving, picking, and shipping. For that, make sure that all your inventory items are attached with barcodes to items, locations, and bins.
- Synching Your Inventory with Sales and Purchasing
To prevent stock imbalances, both your sales and purchasing departments must have access to real-time inventory information. One of the major strengths of Acumatica, as inventory control software, is the ability to unify or sync your inventory with sales and purchasing workflows.
When your inventory levels are updated in real-time with sales and purchases, your team gets accurate and updated data on stock availability and future demands. As a result, the response times to customer orders get enhanced, reducing delays in order fulfillment.
In addition, when your inventory is integrated with purchasing, Acumatica can suggest you reorder quantities based on upcoming sales projections. This ensures optimal stock levels without over-purchasing.
How to Implement Acumatica for Your Manufacturing Business?
Implementing Acumatica ERP into your manufacturing operations is a strategic decision that requires careful planning and execution. Here’s how you can get started to enjoy easy access to Acumatica for your manufacturing business:
- Understanding Acumatica ERP
Before even choosing Acumatica to manage your inventory, it is crucial to get a clear understanding on Acumatica’s capabilities as your inventory management solution. Look into its manufacturing-specific features like BOM, Production Control, Multiple Manufacturing Methodologies, and Production Management. Getting a clear and comprehensive understanding of Acumatica will help you align its tools with your business goals.
- Assess Your Business Needs
Now that you have chosen Acumatica to be your savior, the next step is to assess and understand your business needs. For that, you have to identify the pain points in your current processes. It could be inefficient production schedules, inventory mismanagement, or lack of real-time insights. A detailed analysis of your business needs will help you understand how Acumatica can address these challenges.
- Planning for Implementation
Proper planning is the key to the success of your Acumatica implementation project. For that, define the project scope and objectives, assemble the team, define your requirements, develop a project plan, and start the implementation. Once the implementation is done, training should be planned for all users to get them accommodated with the new system.
- Acumatica X Greytrix
The best way to implement Acumatica into your operation successfully is by letting professionals handle the tussle of it. Greytrix is a certified Acumatica implementation partner with 24+ years of experience. They understand the complexities of implementing Acumatica and have worked closely with manufacturing businesses of all sizes. Their agile approach and understanding of the ERP make them a perfect partner for manufacturing businesses looking to implement Acumatica.
Conclusion
Having effective inventory solutions is crucial for business growth, and with an ERP system like Acumatica, you can keep pace with growing demands, avoid overstocking or shortages, and create a seamless operation.
So, are you ready to step away from manual counting and managing spreadsheets? Give us a call at
+1 888 221 6661 or click here to get in touch to know more ways in which Acumatica can transform your inventory management.