3 Ways to Simplify Inventory Management

Spend your management time on the right things by having all your inventory management in one easy-to-use place.

As a busy manager or operator there never seems to be enough time for you to get to all the small tasks that you need to do to make your business run smoother. There are always going to be guests to handle, fires to put out, and training to conduct. Your inventory management processes should make your life easier instead of giving you more headaches.

But if you use a different software solution for your food and beverage, one for the items you sell, one for redemption items, and so on, you could be setting yourself up for rework, inaccurate reporting and wasted time. Read on for three major ways inventory management is easier with a single facility management software solution.

1. Centralized Inventory Intake

When you use one solution to manage all your inventory items, there is only one process to learn and a central point of accountability and tracking. This makes receiving inventory a snap no matter what part of your business it’s being used in.

As you set up inventory items for each department or division, you can establish PAR levels or reorder levels that will allow you to auto-generate a purchase order and send that order directly to your supplier. It’s a great idea to set up digital packing lists so that when an order comes in, whoever receives the order can quickly cross reference the list against items received, verify shipments and, with a click of a few buttons, take in the items received and add them to your quantities on hand.

Once you have received your product, it is important to regularly do inventory counts (audits) to make sure you don’t have product that is growing legs and walking away. These audits can be targeted to specific vendors to make them manageable. Additionally, you might consider running blind audits where the staff doing the physical counting does not know the expected quantity on hand. This can lend additional security to the process.

CenterEdge only requires you to update quantities when a physical count doesn’t match the system count making audit data entry quick and efficient. You can also set you your inventory with sales units and receiving units, allowing you to keep track of full and partial cases, partial bottles, etc., eliminating much of the guesswork usually associated with manual inventory control practices.

2. Big Picture and Detailed Inventory Control

Do you sell Pepsi in your café, out at mobile drink carts and also in your retail shop? If so, you could be duplicating your efforts ordering and tracking your inventory or you may not have a clear picture of what you’re selling in your park and where.

A central solution that also lets you create separate divisions in your location enables you to take a single inventory item and differentiate sales of that item within the various parts of your facility, while keeping current quantity accurate and auditing simple.

CenterEdge gives you the ability to report Pepsi sales in each of those areas independently, see the overall Pepsi sales across your entire facility, count how many cases and individual bottles you have on hand, and order from your supplier all with a single inventory item.

Using a single solution makes this process seamless, not only for items individually, but also those items that are included in any packages or recipe items.

3. Accurate Reporting

As great as it is to track items as they are received and sold, that is only part of the process. A central solution like CenterEdge lets you see your inventory valuation at any given point by automatically importing your inventory counts and latest vendor costs, monitoring those costs over time, comparing vendor prices for the same products, and recording waste and use of items.

All of this information is stored in your database and is accessible through a wide variety of reports designed to give you the tools you need to efficiently manage your inventory without spending hours poring over spreadsheets and flipping through old packing slips.

Have questions about inventory management in your FEC or waterpark? Contact us info@centeredgesoftware.com.