Best practice checklist warehouse and inventory

Plan all warehouse, show room, credit return, back order receipt and retail locations

Allow space for receipting and plan a good flow of stock from receipting through to shipping areas

Set appropriate location sizes for your business, from one shelf min to two meters max

Setup trucks as stock locations if you use the service module

Set min and max levels for product locations to support stock replenishment from bulk to fast pick or tracks

Set retail locations to quarantine

Print bar coded location labels and place them on the appropriate locations. Consider using non-stick shelf talkers as labels

Manage those slow moving products

Show stock on hand, last receipt date, last sale date and date created on your product list. Then filter to show items created more than three months ago that have stock on hand and a last shipment more than three months ago. 

Review and consider putting on sale slow moving lines that are not parts of ranges

Automate price changes

For your first price update only. Use price book runs to ensure automatic updates will not cause wild changes to cost or sell prices due to variances in units

Once you have settled in price book runs, contact Readysell support and have automatic price updates turned on

Avoid catalogue loads. Even automatic catalogue loads can be replaced by automatic price updates

Manual loads of flyers might be justified, as flyers need to be reviewed and they don't permanently change any sell prices

Consider loading spreadsheets to the price book for any ranges that are not covered by your automatic data feeds

Generate price change labels for your retail area based on last primary sell price changed date

Wireless warehousing using the mobile app on apple, android or windows is just best practice. Change is difficult, your team is probably used to picking from orders or picking slips. But the mobile app is just more efficient. The time has come to move to the best practice and mobile app is it.

Start by parrallel running sale shipments and move on from there

Plan on three hours training and implementation assistance. Every hour you spend on training will save you many hours of trial and error

Buy mobile units that support team viewer so Readysell can provide remote support

Review hour mobile device hardware guide before you purchase any devices

Save time with automated warehousing, if your business is not purely POS based

Automated warehousing can benefit every business. Take the time to understand the settings on your site file

The learning curve is justified, if you are not using automatic warehousing have it turned on

Reduce costs, save time and increase customer loyalty with advanced warehousing features

Wireless tables for putting away purchase receipts and picking sale shipments

Scan checking of purchase receipts entering the business. Consider using a large screen so your team can see your receipts display from a distance

Scan checking sale shipments

Automated warehousing as noted above

Drag quantity on sales back order onto the purchase receipt lines view. Then put aside that quantity into a back orders area. This saves a lot of time as pickers don't have to walk to the shelves to collect back orders

Picking slips with a count bigger than one are for back orders. So picking slips "2 of 2" is for backorders. Train your team to take such picking slips to the back order are

Save time and reduce costs by understanding

your warehouse and your team

Readysell can report on bin hits per hour to measure the effectiveness of your warehouse layout. The fast movers should be near the front of your warehouse

Download the List Report: "Shipment lines by location by hour" from the Readysell Store if you do not already have this report to run.

You can add any columns onto the report once you've run it for further information if you require them.

Picker shipment lines per day and credit/error rates can be tracked. Use this information to monitor your team. Perhaps additional training is required.

Save time and reduce costs by preparing for stockakes

Understand and plan the type of stock you will be using. There are a variety of stocktake methods and a separate group of stocktake stock clearing methods. Make sure you understand the difference between the methods of running stocktakes and the methods of clearing stock. 

Ensure you have a manual checklist to plan and track stocktake progress

If you are still in doubt use the ad-hock stocktake method. 

Setup locations and location labels before stocktake

Consider doing a stocktake without counting the stock, just to put the stock in the right locations

Laptops are best for your first stocktake

Tablets are best for second stocktakes, once you know all your barcodes are captured correctly for your product range

Reduce costs by tracking stock adjustments

Retail workstations can make automatic stock adjustments so that customers can buy stock that they have in their hands but which is not yet receipted into the system. Those adjustments should reverse. Review automatic stock adjustments once a week to check they are being automatically reversed

Stock adjustments can be made from sales by right clicking on the product, consider applying security limits to this feature. If not review the number, value and created by for stock adjustments each week

Ensure staff classify stock adjustments to the correct stock adjustment type. "short stock" should only be used where other more defined reasons such as "damaged stock" do not apply

Improve revenue with optimal price options

Fixed sell prices suit prices that are automatically updated from external data feeds. If the sell price is not updated automatically, do not use fixed sell prices

The price method for each price level can be adjusted for individual products

Use markup from cost to ensure you hold your margin as costs change

Price categories on products can override other price rules. For example on large ranges of low cost consumables that you import without recommended sells

Price levels can be discounts from other levels, this can reduce your number of contracts and your price maintenance load

Put customers on price levels to provide incentives without the maintenance involved in contract prices

Remember, contracts can apply to supplier costs

Make use of market competitor price levels if they are updated into your system