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| | The Minding Your Own Business Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts | | The challenges of managing inventory as a small-business owner | Views: 1236 | | Mar 28, 2007 6:16 pm | | The challenges of managing inventory as a small-business owner | # |
CJ Prince | | I'm a business writer for a national small biz publication researching an article on small business challenges re: inventory management. I'm interested in hearing from entrepreneurs about your experience with trying to keep inventory on the shelves without wasting money. Has anyone here tried implementing some kind of "just-in-time" system, or have you found that to be too expensive/difficult as a small-biz owner?
Would love to hear thoughts on this!
Thanks much,
c.j. Private Reply to CJ Prince | | Mar 28, 2007 8:13 pm | | re: The challenges of managing inventory as a small-business owner | # | 
Reg Charie | | When I was selling hard goods online I used the inventory management system in my CMS software CRELoaded to track stock.
In another instance a client with 9 brick and mortar stores used his Point Of Sale software (POS) to consolidate all the inventory for his webstore and this was updated daily.
As most of the inventory were unique items, (used cds), a routine was setup to notify a picker in each store when an online sale was made. This prevented the item from being sold online and in the store.
Before this was implemented, "no fill" orders often ran to 50% online.
Reg
http://DotCom-Productions.com Private Reply to Reg Charie | | Mar 29, 2007 1:14 am | | re: re: The challenges of managing inventory as a small-business owner | # | 
Lindy Asimus | | Definitely invest in a POS system that has the capability of working in with your inventory to do what you need it to do.
Example, I introduced a colleague to a business for this purpose in 2000 and they decided reissuing category details was "too hard" so they did not and have since put 4 times the cost into a product to be developed which they Still Do Not Have to date.
At the same time another business, only a much smaller affair, had implemented the system. They did so on a bit of faith and candidly, it was not until they did their first order that they really understood what it was they had now.
Long story short, the owner is more in control, business has taken off his staff has risen from 4 to 16 because he was able to take on new opportunities that arose in this time, and because he was able to manage it now, he was in the position to take on those opportunties.
No question. Get some good advice on what is possible for your business and do whatever you have to do to implement what makes sense.
Good luck with it.
Lindy
www.designbusinessengineering.comPrivate Reply to Lindy Asimus | | Mar 29, 2007 8:50 pm | | re: The challenges of managing inventory as a small-business owner | # | 
Fred Keller | | Hi CJ,
Make use of having samples on display &/or great catalogues.
Customers will wait for things to be special-ordered ....for them.
Much depends on the idiosyncracies of the business, the market etc...
I say keep minimal investment in inventory.....but then, you can't sell from an empty wagon either. Thus the Dilemma.
Hope this adds some perspective.
Fred
PS: Why don't you start your own business and write from personal experience? More impact that way. Just a thought. :o)
Get Free Gas for Life: http://fuel.first411.comPrivate Reply to Fred Keller | | Apr 04, 2007 3:28 am | | re: The challenges of managing inventory as a small-business owner | # | 
Kurt Schweitzer | | CJ,
I recently started a scooter dealership, and am learning many new things about inventory.
1. "Just in time" is only as good as the inventory levels of your suppliers. If your suppliers don't have an item, you aren't able to sell it to your customers. Shipping time and cost is also a factor. My main scooter vendor only has stock in his LA warehouse. It costs me $300 per unit to ship from there, by rail and truck. The delay between order and delivery is two weeks, provided the units are in stock. This should improve by early summer, but for right now the costs are quite painful.
2. Inventory levels affect service levels. Investing in more inventory allows you to provide better service to your customers - faster delivery, wider selection, more sizes, options, colors, whatever. Which place offers better service - the one with dozens of choices in your size, or the one where everything has to be special ordered?
3. Products are better at selling themselves than pictures. At an average cost of $1,000 each I can't afford to stock many scooters in my store, yet I don't have enough experience to be able to judge what sells and what doesn't. As a compromise I invested in a video projector, which allows me to display nearly life sized images of the scooters from the manufacturer's website. Even with this, I still need to be able to show customers what "blue" really looks like, etc. They also get to examine the products in person, to better judge the quality. You can't get that from a picture.
4. Tracking inventory is a nightmare! The best way is to have a barcode on everything, lock everything up, and have a process in place whereby each individual item is logged in and out. Reality is that many items are nearly impossible to tag, you need to have things accessible for customer inspection, and the moment when you most want to give an item to a customer is when some portion of your process - either the equipment or the staff - will fail.
5. A good purchasing manager can have a direct, positive influence on your bottom line. In my industry this is the "Parts and Accessories" guy, who spends his days surfing supplier websites looking to see who has which parts available at what prices. It IS a full time job, because price and availability change daily. I fully expect that at some point my inventory levels will be such that "parts arbitrage" will become a significant revenue source. Right now I'm still trying to find the right sort of "wheeler dealer" to fill the position.
I hope this helps you with your article.
Kurt Schweitzer
Urban Village ScootersPrivate Reply to Kurt Schweitzer | | Apr 04, 2007 3:53 am | | re: re: The challenges of managing inventory as a small-business owner | # |
Reg Charie | | Not only lock things up Kurt, CHAIN things together.
I worked in a motorcycle shop in Toronto and thieves rammed a stolen truck through the front windows, which were barred, and took off with every piece of power equipment and outboards.
Reg
http://DotCom-Productions.com
Private Reply to Reg Charie | | Apr 19, 2007 2:09 am | | re: The challenges of managing inventory as a small-business owner | # |
Kristie McDonald | | We own an online hobby shop and our biggest challenge with inventory is expanding our product line without going broke. Being a small business, we cannot afford to carry every vehicle and every part, but our customers expect a variety or they walk.
I am in the process of coming up with an inventory strategy and it is going to involve 1. Choosing a subset of the most popular vehicles for which we'll carry a full line of parts 2. finding out what the most popular parts for each vehicle are (so far most manufacturers have this data and have agreed to share it), 3. calculating my breakeven point on when I can afford to dropship something instead of stocking it (risky if the distributor runs low and I am not aware), 4. using dropshiping to test certain items and Ultimately deciding what the most cost-effective items are to stock. This may take an investment on smaller parts but then we'll know what to stock without risking stale inventory.
It is very complicated but crucial to our long term success.
I am very fortunate to have a really good inventory management system with our online store service.
Hope that helps. I'd be happy to share at a later date which of the strategies above work the best.
Kristie McDonald
kristiem@nitrotoyz.com
www.Nitro-Toyz.com
Private Reply to Kristie McDonald | | |
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