By Odin Mckenzie 
Inventory control is a critical operation for distributors and manufacturers, particularly in this changing landscape, where recording keeping is obsolete due to digital transformation. There is a need for businesses to utilize available technological solutions to help them grow, compete, and thrive. It is advisable to have a firm understanding of product inventory and ensure your inventory management system is up to date.
Remember that your ultimate purpose is to prevent fraud, lower costs, and speed the fulfillment process. For instance, having overstocked inventory is cost and time inefficient, but may also take up warehousing space that would have been used for other products that have a huge demand. Losing sales because of lack of inventory could result in poor customer service and even drive customers to your competitors.
Workflow/Alerts
Whenever changes to inventory occur, it is bound to affect various supply chain players that include customer, manufacturer, distributor, and supplier. You should note that workflow alerts send automated emails, push notifications, texts, and emails whenever unexpected changes do happen to the inventory. Some of the issues that can be solved by workflow alerts include late purchasing orders, backorders, incorrect receiving quantity, and delayed merchandise.
Inventory Forecasting
You should note that inventory forecasting is quite important when it comes to stock planning. In fact, forecasting tools utilize historical sales data to predict future performance that can be used to determine the demand levels of inventory. You should note that forecasting reports are meant to ensure adequate resources are set aside for inventory. By using formulas, data algorithms, patterns, and trends of sales can be tracked with a lot of accuracies. In fact, forecasting tools are used to serve as the foundation for this given information.
Material Requirements Planning
As you know, it is time-consuming to manage sufficient material. In this case, material requirements planning solutions help to speed up the workflow and assess the need for all products being manufactured to ensure there are adequate materials for production. Most MRP solutions analyze sales orders, purchase orders, production orders, sales forecasts, and inventory levels. That helps a manufacturer to analyze the future and current material requirements for cost-effective planning.
Cargo Tracking
If you import goods from another country, you know how challenging it can be to provide accurate delivery times and even tracking where the goods are during the transfer process. You should note that cargo trucking tools help collect imports into a single database.
Kirk Boley