4 benefits of inventory management automation

When you’re just starting out selling products, it’s easy enough to keep up with stock in your garage or a small storage space using paper or a spreadsheet program. However, once you start to grow your business, these tools can limit your potential. With greater customer demand comes the need for a larger space and more staff — and things can quickly get overwhelming without inventory management automation.

The basics of inventory management automation

Inventory management is the process of ordering, storing, processing, and selling goods for your business. This process applies to everything from raw materials to finished products, depending on the scope of your operations. The purpose of this process is to optimize the cost of managing your inventory and the amount of inventory you hold at one time to help you avoid shortages and gluts.

With inventory management automation, you use technology to perform routine or repetitive inventory management tasks with little to no human intervention. A digital solution can handle mundane responsibilities, often in mere minutes. That’s a lot better than having your team members spend entire shifts on those tasks.

Retailers, wholesalers, distributors, and other entities that store or handle inventory can use automated inventory management systems to make the process more efficient and free up staff to focus on higher-level tasks.

4 benefits of inventory management automation

1. Avoid overselling and overbooking

If you’ve ever run out of stock in the middle of a sale and kept getting orders, you’ve no doubt dealt with very unhappy customers. And who can blame them? Customers buy a product and expect the business to deliver it, whether they’ve bought the product for themselves or as a gift for someone else. The last thing they want is to get an email saying your business made a mistake and you don’t have any more of the item available.

Inventory management automation can save you the hassle by keeping customers from being able to purchase a product or book an event once inventory is depleted. For example, you can use the Jotform inventory widget to ensure customers only purchase or book what’s available. That means no more apologetic emails about unfulfillable orders.

2. Reduce inventory management costs

Inventory management automation helps lower your operational costs. For example, with less human intervention, you avoid — or at least mitigate — costly human errors, such as undercounting or overcounting stock, missing items in customer orders, and so on.

In addition, by automating the tasks your team typically performs, you can limit the number of staff hours needed to manage your inventory or even reassign staff to focus on other tasks.

3. Streamline inventory tracking

Every warehouse worker knows the headache of inventory counts, especially when they have to count by hand. Making tally marks and updating a spreadsheet are outdated approaches. You can modernize inventory counts by placing barcodes on individual products, pallets of boxes, warehouse bays, or whatever makes sense for your operations.

Barcodes work for more than just keeping count. For example, with the Jotform barcode widget, you can look up products, scan event tickets, and expedite data entry.

4. Never forget to reorder stock

Some automation solutions can take the task of reordering stock off your hands. Instead of manually tracking inventory levels and ordering more when those levels are low, you can get reminders from the system to reorder a product once it falls below a preset quantity. More robust systems can even place the order for you.

Inventory management automation with Jotform

Now that you understand the benefits of inventory management automation, the logical next step is to figure out how to reap those benefits. That’s where a solution like Jotform comes in — it’s a powerful form builder that many businesses use to enable inventory management automation.

With Jotform inventory form templates, you can

• Update inventory by product name, quantity on hand, quantity to order, and unit price
• Track office supplies, restaurant ingredients, and other products
• Accept and track orders from your customers

Ready to try Jotform? Customize a prebuilt inventory template to make it your own, or you can build one from scratch.