Competitive service providers manage their inventory towards efficiency and profitability. That’s why so many small field service business owners are turning to contractor dispatching solutions to establish inventory levels in their service vans and warehouses. By using modern, automated solutions, customers receive outstanding service, while the business enjoys optimum net savings.
As you know, keeping track of parts can be tricky. Today's solutions help to balance stock parts and supplies, while allowing you to factor in more complex cost variables that impact profitability, such as available space, insurance, and interest on borrowed funds. Solving your inventory management challenges with an integrated solution will deliver superior customer service, less warehouse labor and costs, consistent deliveries, efficient management, maximized space usage, and improved cash flow.
Field service providers operating without inventory management expose themselves to a wide range of debilitating business outcomes, including the following:
- Wasting hours of manual work: There are still many service providers operating with obsolete software or worse, using spreadsheets to try to manage their inventory. These companies waste time and money on redundant data entry, manually sifting through paperwork, and fixing errors. The software doesn’t keep track of inventory in real-time, resulting in costly mistakes.
- Holding excess stock: Holding onto excess stock is one of the most common issues plaguing small and medium sized-businesses like yours. Companies without modern software struggle to keep track of every piece and product. This lack of insight often results in reordering materials too early or in higher quantities than necessary.
- Suffering from lack of training: There are plenty of clunky inventory management software packages available, and many come from vendors that do not offer virtual or in-person training or online resources. As a result, employees fail to get up to speed. For example, a lack of integration with accounting adds confusion and redundant data entry. Most businesses cannot afford the time it takes to learn complicated software, train their own employees, solve problems related to lack of integration, and figure out what went wrong when mistakes ultimately arise.
- Over- or under-ordering: Once-a-year inventory audits help keep track of items, but unless you want to tie up your staff doing this chore every month you can’t rely just on stock quantities. When you are unsure about how much inventory you have, it’s easy to tie up cash by ordering parts that aren't needed.
- Losing track of items in inventory: Without an accurate inventory count, it’s easy to lose track of parts and supplies. Whether a part was incorrectly used on a job, or it “fell off the truck,” your insight into the true cost of jobs and inventory becomes skewed.
- Lacking selling performance data: Speaking of a lack of insight, without an accurate inventory management system, the cost of any job can be way off. In today’s competitive environment, you have to be able to anticipate – not simply respond to – customer demand. Buying parts retail because you’re already at the job site, or not getting accurate counts from employees on parts use, all contribute to your ROI.
- No performance metrics: Without an understanding of fill rates and inventory turns for all stock, you’re losing profits. It’s imperative to know when orders are coming in and when they’re going out.
You’re in business to make profits, and in today’s competitive environment, the margin for error is too slim to take risks. As part of a comprehensive solution, strong inventory management enables your executives to set standards and closely monitor and improve performance over time.
The use of contractor dispatching software can help address your ever-changing supply chain inventory struggles. Using a solution that can track and control inventory will improve your knowledge of inventory levels, provide access to detailed views of parts and available inventory, which in turn will lead to better first-time fix rates, a more satisfying customer experience, and greater opportunities for upselling.
Learn more about how ECI’s business management software can help you automate and streamline all inventory functions, reduce or eliminate mistakes, and spend far fewer hours on managing inventory– with much more accurate and reliable performance.