Conventional inventory control in warehousing is riddled with opportunities for costly mistakes. From mispicks to lost inventory, your profitability is disappearing with your shipments. And the time spent having warehouse staff either searching for items, counting inventory, or manually entering data into the system leads to human error.
With the ease of integrating barcoding. there’s no reason to simply accept the losses from these outdated methods as the cost of doing business. Switching over to inventory management with barcodes—marking and tracking inventory and shipments—reduces errors and increases productivity.
Consider this
*If one employee spends 20 minutes per shift trying to find misplaced inventory, you are paying for two 40-hour weeks per year and getting nothing of value in return. If you apply this math across your staff and every shift, how much money are you wasting?
*A warehouse employee spends a total of two hours per week correcting incorrect shipments—which includes tracking down the shipment, replacing the goods, reshipping, and restocking the returns. In addition to the cost of the return and replacement shipments, you’re paying for 100 hours per year to correct errors that resulted from a manual system
*Overage of a certain product has been stocked high up on shelves and forgotten. Customers are getting backorder notices—and the frustration that goes with them—because the putaway wasn’t accurately noted in the system.
Switching to inventory management with barcodes enables your employees to easily label and scan incoming and outgoing inventory and automatically send the data to your database. You reduce the manual handling, which dramatically cuts the errors and increases productivity. Your operation regains those countless hours spent looking for lost inventory, trying to calm down customers who received the wrong order, replacing shipments, and mishandling the inventory counts.
From a bottom line perspective, the cost of implementing inventory management with barcodes is not an expense but an investment with a powerful ROI.
Check out Manufacturing and Barcodes, our new ebook about the uses of barcodes in manufacturing.
