Ideas to manage stocks efficiently?
I have a costumer who has a small family company. It's just she and her daughter.
They have regularly 2000 products in stock and 1990 are different...
They've been running this business in the old fashion way, taking the inventory by hand, making invoices by hand, etc...
They now would like to start using an ERP to run the business and have a better control of inventory, clients files, etc...
The problem is that they have lots of products, all different, and they just dont't think it will be easy (considering the time that will take to do it) to create every product in the software to sell it only once and then discard it...
So I'm asking all you guys if you have a small business, how do you run your stocks? Do you have automatized ways to do it? What suggestions do you have for a better control, for improving the time that it will take to store each week more than 100 new products on the computer system, etc... How to generate the tags, bar codes, reference codes, etc...
any help will be appreciated!
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M$3 Answers
This is the easiest solution:
Call Dell. They have a special team of people that will listen to your requirements and explain the options.
1-877-247-3355
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/us/segments/bsd/point-of-sale-solutions?c=us&l=en&cs=04
Pick either the Quickbooks software or the pcAmerica software. Since the company only has 20,000 products and 1 location, I suggest Quickbooks. It's a little easier to use and local accountants often freelance support and training as required.
This will likely cost about $3000.
2)
Alternatively, if the company will not grow and all it would like to do is catalog and track inventory, this $1100 kit from Wasp (a well known name in this industry) will work well:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Retail_POS_Scanners/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=A2146565
The kit comes with a barcode reader, label printer and software to track inventory and mark it "in or out".
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M$
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M$I think part of the question is whether they want to run the small business like a small business or whether they want to making it more scalable. Barcodes and Excel might work pretty well for a small operation, but it really isn't a solution for growth. In the small to medium sized business space, I've heard some good things about Microsoft Dynamics (http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/en/us/default.aspx).
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M$
In terms of loading data into an ERP (or even Excel or Access) try using something like DataLoad (www.dataload.net). It is really helpful for loading inventory/item data into a system.
Use something like Excel to "create" sequential item numbers (sorry @robbrown for yet another Excel reference, it just is a simple, common solution here!). "Dumb" item numbers (non-intelligent, sequential) work well (note: use item descriptions and categories to store your item info). Once you have your item/inventory data in an "Excel" format, you can use a program like DataLoad to enter them into your ERP/Inventory system.
Hi guys, you made very nice points!
I understood when you mentioned we could use excel and access, you're trying to explain that sometimes simply solutions are more than enough.
also Microsoft dynamics is indeed a good solution but to go that way i would prefer to choose a Portuguese ERP that I have better knowledge and it would be much easier for me to implement.
The biggest concern here is the time that will be needed to place all products within the ERP... As I said, they've lots of products (almost 2000) and 95% of them are different... So it will be very time consuming to create all of them on the ERP, and very ungrateful because the products are sold once and not more than that...
We're also having difficulty in choosing the product codes to implement on the system... Anyone has any ideas?
Thanks ahead for your help!
@robbrown - no offense taken. My point wasn't that Excel was a great solution (hopefully it didn't come across that way), but more that sometimes people go for a more complicated solution than they need. A basic solution is often a decent option.
Also working around in Excel or Access initially will give you an idea what you REALLY need. I think your suggestions are better tools, but building something small and simple will also help you know WHAT you actually need. It would be a waste to drop $3000 or more on a solution when you only need about 10% of the functionality.
PLEASE don't use excel. I.T. folks like me with a solid amount of experience with small and medium sized businesses HATE excel. Excel will cost more money than it will save. Excel is not an inventory system. It is a calculator.
For all that is good and decent with the world, please don't use excel.
@mrcal - I'm not knocking your answer. You make some very good points. MS Dynamics is interesting and a custom database like Access would be a professional solution. It's just that MS Excel is so horribly evil for things like this that I can't not say anything.
