emman's blog
In the USA alone, in June 2021, companies carried more than $2 trillion worth of inventory in their warehouses and distribution centers; other estimates say as much as 90 percent of that was stationary for the month. When it sits for a longer time, that inventory could quickly become a loss for those companies.
Your company might face the same risk, but if you don’t have a warehouse ERP or a similar system, would you know? Could you quantify the risk based on manual inventory counts and best-guesses about how long the SKU at the back of the shelf has been there?
Warehouse management tools are a primary way for companies to manage inventory and optimize orders, helping them keep margins high and avoid unnecessary losses. We’re looking at the warehouse modules inside of many of today’s ERP platforms to describe the value they provide and how you could benefit even more by adopting warehouse-specific software with extra functionality. Let’s dive into learning what’s right for you and the integration plans your businesses may have in the future.
How ERP software and warehouse systems work together
Warehouse ERP systems are growing more robust and providing greater functionality, which is delaying the need for some businesses to employ more sophisticated warehouse management software systems. An ERP can help your business run its warehouse more efficiently, either on its own or as part of a broader technology stack that includes a warehouse management system.
Getting started with a warehouse ERP usually involves a significant amount of data collection around your current operation, inventory, and orders. You can employ the ERP to track inventory locations and levels, overall orders, and limited KPIs around order pick, pack, and other fulfillment needs.
For many companies, adding a warehouse ERP software system or module can solve a lot of common issues that crop up when you’ve got processes that are manually laborious. Automation, in the sense of software and not robotics, is a proven way to give your warehouse a better operation. ERPs enable a significant amount of that automation.
Here are some of the most significant related benefits you’ll find by employing an ERP warehouse solution.
Inventory management: Warehouse ERP solutions reduce your inventory counts and tracking by hours each week, by automatically updating SKUs, counts, and dead stock as you fill orders and move through the month.
By following items as you use them to fill orders, and by giving pickers specific orders to eliminate inaccurate grabs, you’re dealing with less inventory loss—this includes fewer times you pick the wrong product and then put it down on a random shelf to “deal with that later.”
Picking optimization: Building on inventory management is the ability of a warehouse ERP to give your teams picking orders that move them efficiently through your warehouse. You’ll help your team pick more accurately and reduce the amount they walk or retrace steps, which adds up to happier employees at the end of the day.
Warehouse ERP systems can also update picking orders with new locations when you move bins, whether that’s because a product is more popular and needs to be centrally located or you ordered more than usual and have an overflow bin to tackle first.
Staff support: If you’re not using an ERP or WMS to run your warehouse, you’ve got a lot of manual processes for any new team member to learn. Most of these are going to be institutional, while not necessarily intuitive for the new person. They’re also learning a system that is most likely not something that is similar to other software they’ve used before.
ERP systems are fairly standardized and tend to feel like other software, making them a little easier for your teams to learn. If you’re growing, this means fewer errors as large sets of new people join and have to learn how you operate.
The end of the spreadsheet: My personal favorite is the ability of a warehouse ERP to remove your need to create and update warehouse spreadsheets manually. It only takes one mistake when updating a spreadsheet for there to be a disruption in a wide range of orders, inventory counts, and more.
You might still do some operations in Excel, but you’ll generally have a much nicer dashboard where it is more difficult to input the wrong value or move a cell accidentally. We’ve all dragged the wrong item or clicked on a different cell when a formula was highlighted and put a big hole in a project. Warehouse ERPs minimize this possibility, and the first time it protects you from a mistake will make it all feel worthwhile.
Improved customer service: And finally, a smart warehouse with a robust ERP makes it easier to deliver your orders on time and be correct more often. This drives up your customer service and satisfaction levels. At the same time, ERP knowledge about your inventory levels helps you limit out-of-stocks and keep things from being back ordered, which minimizes customer frustrations.
Wrap Up!
Adopting new tech or integrating it with existing packages should follow leading change management best practices. This will ensure your team is ready for the latest tech and that you’re putting the training and information requirements in place to ensure everyone uses the system you buy, generating a better ROI.
Averiware warehouse management system is often used by businesses that maintain high-value inventory, have a small warehouse, or want increased growth. It is known for the simple deployment, low costs, and high degree of customizability. Get in touch for a demo today!
Chatbots in educational institutes are very likely to be widely used in schools and universities over the next two to four years. Let’s discuss some of the areas chatbots are influencing the education sector today.
1. Streamlining the admission process
Essentially, the admission process is communication, since there is an exchange of information, like personal details and credentials, in the process. Since chatbots are a means of automating communication, they can come in handy in the admission processes.
They can intelligently engage with students throughout their admission journey. Some chatbots can work using prompts (they can prompt the user for some form of input). This means that they can have inbuilt requirements that can aid admission. These requirements could include details that institutions need for the admission process. Another way it can be used is in institutions of higher learning that admit students from various parts of the world. By leveraging chatbots, admission logistics can be more efficient.
There are institutions of learning that are well on the course of building chatbots with such capabilities. In fact, these chatbots are already in operation in some institutions. Chatbots have the ability to scale communications and facilitate data/information exchange. This will definitely increase their role in admission processes over time.
2. Easy-to-access institutional information
It is now even more easy for students to explore their options and what they can do at an educational institute.
Chatbots are a great way to share information and build a strong online presence. Students can visit your website and ask the bot any query related to your institution, be it values, courses, competitions or any other college/school-related activity.
Chatbots can also be used to reach out to a larger audience and spread information, send reminders, notifications, etc. It’s faster and more effective than people reaching out to the administrator for updates. The repetitive task of a teacher or an administrator in answering each query personally is automated and this allows them to use their time in more important ways.
3.Tech support and troubleshoot problems with university software
After on-boarding students and introducing them to campus life, university chatbots can continue to play the role of virtual assistants for sundry online tasks. Some of the world’s best chatbots for university websites double up as virtual tech support personnel, helping students troubleshoot problems with university software, email accounts, and so on. Their chat scripts often incorporate software tutorials that students can process easily on account of the simple question-and-answer format of the interaction.
Rattle Tech is the leading chatbot development company for educational institutes, ITSM, and healthcare industries, helping them improve their customer service, lead generation, and sales around the world.
Employees who deliver services in the field face a wide range of challenges to accomplish their tasks efficiently while providing superior customer service. From scheduling appointments and visiting different locations to servicing equipment or inspecting facilities, field employees have a lot on their plate. Fortunately, new cloud-based technologies enable them to do their jobs more effectively and provide data for management and customers to make better business decisions. Let’s take a look at how an integrated mobile field service app or an inspection management solution can help your business save time, reduce errors, and provide actionable data.
How Cloud Technology Can Help
Being organized is vital for field technicians, inspectors, and other employees who perform services at client locations. Even the slightest error or omission can result in an unwanted outcome and client dissatisfaction. A feature-rich mobile field service app or inspection management solution can enable field technicians and inspectors, delivery drivers, and other team members to manage transactions and access forms and data with a smartphone or tablet.
Whether they need to update or close open issues, view customer and equipment locations, find replacement parts, update an inspection log, create an invoice, or provide price quotes, field employees can complete tasks in a paperless environment, accessing customer information, mobile forms, digital instructions, and data through the cloud.
A mobile field management app streamlines case management, order management, and issue management, and it lowers the risk of miscommunication between field techs and home offices. A robust mobile field service app or inspection management solution will also integrate into ERP and CRM solutions, giving field techs everything they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.
Benefits of Mobile Forms
Mobile forms are one of the primary features of a field service app. They provide many benefits, including:
Enabling users to collect information in real time
Capturing pictures and videos
Avoiding the need to re-enter data into another system or Excel sheet
Simplifying the storage and retrieval of past forms
Making managing past forms easier
Automating expensive, time-consuming manual processes
Providing offline access
A mobile field service app will ensure that your field employees don’t miss appointments, deliveries, or pick-ups and perform their jobs properly.
Benefits of an Inspection Management Solution
For businesses providing inspection services, mobile technologies used by your inspectors will help your clients reduce risks, improve quality, and ensure compliance, and they will help support environment, health, and safety protocols. An inspection management solution provides many benefits, including
Scheduling inspections
Enabling the creation of customized forms, checklists, and reports
Filling out and submitting inspection reports
Speeding up inspections
Distributing reports
Analyzing collected data
Automating manual processes
Providing an audit trail
By consolidating your systems, an inspection management solution helps your inspectors streamline inspections, flag issues, and track issues until they’re resolved — all while using fewer resources.
Each Business Is Unique
When your field teams transition to using digital forms, you will need forms that fit your workflow and business logic and that are tailored to fit your specific data collection needs. A robust mobile field app or inspection management solution will provide an easy-to-use online form builder that enables you to design customized, intuitive forms and create forms, checklists, and other documents that employees can fill out easily and efficiently — even for the most complex field tasks. A full-featured solution will empower your teams to use field forms to generate reports and data sets and to distribute them electronically to clients and throughout your organization.
Conclusion
If you’re in the market for a cloud-based solution to deliver service excellence and transform worker productivity, take a look at our mobile field services app and our inspection forms module. Your field employees can access them from anywhere at any time, and they seamlessly integrate the management of work orders within your company’s workflows. Contact us today, and one of our experts will work with you to show you how Averiware’s advanced erp software solution can help resolve your business problems and get you to where you want to be.
Why do fully stocked warehouses need cloud-based inventory management software? Let’s be honest: all-night stock take blitzes and over-complicated excel spreadsheets are painful to use, unnecessarily labor-intensive, and incredibly outdated.
Why torture yourself and your team when there are cheaper and faster options available online? Sure, you might run a small business on a tight budget and can’t justify big, fancy new software. Luckily for you, cloud inventory management is actually more affordable than the old-school methods you’re currently using, and that’s just one perk.
Below we’ve compiled seven reliable ways cloud inventory management is a smart investment for your business.
Access Real-Time Inventory Control
Easy stock control is one of the most exciting benefits of cloud inventory management. Instead of combing through piles of reports from different systems and departments, or worse, making “educated” guesses, cloud software lets you view up-to-the-minute data on inventory levels through easy-to-understand reports and dashboards.
And instead of relying on special, manual stock-takes that require extra labor and could interrupt your operations (costly for growing businesses and large, multi-location companies alike), cloud inventory software often includes features like QR code tracking that allow you to actively measure stock as it flows through your operations. which can save you much more than the cost of a monthly software subscription.
But the time-savings don’t end there; the automation cloud inventory systems bring can drastically reduce the number of costly human errors you and your team make.
Get Up-To-Date Inventory Reports & Insights
If you’re business savvy, you probably know your top 5 best-selling products, but do you know your lowest-selling ones? You may notice how well you sell during Christmas, but do you know when demand actually peaks and troughs?
Questions like these are answered by inventory reports automatically generated by cloud software. By knowing your lowest-selling items, you can make strategic decisions like upgrading those products, changing your marketing tactics, or ditching them altogether to focus on something new.
And knowing when demand for your products is actually at its peak, you’ll be able to order enough stock without overdoing it, saving money and storage space while also maintaining enough safety stock to prevent “out of stock” notices that cost you customers.
With the inventory reports you’ll get from cloud inventory software, you’ll be able to deeply understand the last quarter so you can effectively forecast for the next, which means better customer service and faster business growth.
Quick Installation & Easier Employee Training
The old way of doing business required you to install software on each and every computer your team uses and have a dedicated IT department to keep that software running.
This cuts into profits, slowing down training time and increasing labor costs. Cloud software doesn’t require any additional employees or special hardware, you just log in and get to work!
And since they don’t rely on dedicated in-person training to teach your team how to use the new software, most cloud companies have streamlined their software’s learning curve so that everyone can understand the basics and start using it on day one.
Quick QR Code Tracking Systems
QR and barcodes are essential to modern cloud inventory management; if you’re not using them, you’re practically living in the supply chain dark ages.
Paired with the right cloud software, they provide detailed, real-time insight into your inventory levels across your operations, saving you from ordering too much (which forces you to sell at clearance prices) or ordering too little (which forces you to break out that costly “out of stock” sign).
While this is a more effective strategy than depending on educated guesses, with a reliable cloud inventory management system that uses QR or barcode technology, a few simple changes to your production processes can provide much more accurate data that lets you know exactly how much inventory you have in stock – saving you hours of time and reducing human error.
Smooth & Continuous E-commerce Integration
Can you imagine manually entering all the data from your e-commerce platform into your inventory management system, and then again into your accounting software? If you operate like many other businesses, you might not have to imagine it – that may be your day-to-day reality. Fortunately, you can sidestep or end that nightmare with cloud inventory management software.
By automatically syncing data across multiple top business applications like Shopify and Xero, modern inventory management software can save you a ton of time spent on manual data entry.
This allows you absolute control over your operations across all channels, enabling you to see where your inventory is currently held, the status of your purchase and sales orders, and ensure your accounting is up-to-date and accurate all from one place.
Manage Multi-Site Operations from Anywhere in the World
While there are many benefits of cloud inventory management, one of the most important for the busy entrepreneur is being able to operate their business any time, any place.
With cloud software, you can manage multiple warehouses wherever you are, allowing you to buy, sell, and manufacture with ease. If your team operates remotely, then your product manager in Detroit can update your distributor in New York in real-time.
And you can generate reports on the spot for a trade show in LA or for a business presentation to new investors in Hong Kong. 24/7, anywhere accessibility makes cloud inventory software perfect for startups without a physical location and international companies alike.
