How Strategic Inventory Management Benefits the Food Industry

Proper inventory management can be tough, especially when you’re dealing with perishable food products. To ensure fresh food reaches consumers in its intended quality, you’ll need a reliable system in place.

Managing inventory strategically can take the guesswork out of purchase orders and helps with buying products that customers will want. 

This article will provide information on strategic inventory management and how it benefits the food industry.

Defining inventory management

Inventory management involves overseeing products that make their way through the supply chain. It includes processes like ordering, storing, processing, distributing, and selling. 

Various systems exist to help with the management of different products, from complete products to raw materials to food to components. 

Inventory management is critical in the supply chain, as it helps prevent shortages, stockouts, and other challenges along the production line. Implementing effective inventory management practices can help businesses optimize stock levels, reduce waste, improve efficiency, meet customer demand, and ensure product quality and freshness. 

Storage is one of the most important elements of proper inventory management. By keeping track of expiration dates and storing food at the right temperatures and in the right warehouse conditions, distributors and processors can prevent spoilage and prolong the life of products. 

Although inventory systems can be manual, automation can help track and manage stock levels better, allowing businesses to make more informed decisions about current and future products. 

The benefits of proper inventory management

Let’s discuss the benefits of an efficient inventory management system in more detail. 

Optimized stock levels 

With a proper inventory management system in place, you’ll have the market data on hand and can map out historical trends to help predict optimal product levels. This helps to reduce the risk of overstocking or stockouts. 

Having a system in place can also help maximize sales opportunities by helping predict what customers want to buy during different seasons or holidays. 

Fresh products 

Tracking inventory and understanding expiration dates helps processors and distributors monitor shelf life and rotation, ensuring that older items are shipped first. 

Inventory tracking reduces the amount of time food is in transit by addressing challenges as they happen. Such an efficient system extends the product’s shelf life, which increases the value of the food for the retail customer. 

Cost control

Tracking inventory levels and turnover rates helps businesses save money by minimizing the risk of buying excess products. 

Automated systems in particular use historical data and market trends to more accurately predict stock levels, keeping cash in the bank and profit in your pockets. 

Moreover, this data is also important for knowing when to make bulk orders or negotiate the cost of the order. 

Compliance 

Inventory management systems help meet compliance standards. Tracking products throughout the supply chain allows you to understand where a product is located at any given time, which can be useful for recalls when needed.

Increased efficiency 

Many strategies, such as operational efficiency, automated data tracking and replenishment, barcode scanning, and real-time inventory tracking, all help to improve overall efficiency in the supply chain.

Using automated processes further speeds up operations, fulfills orders more quickly, helps with production and distribution, enables better decision making for procurement, and results in determining the right price per item.

Strategies to improve inventory management

The primary reason for improving your inventory management system is to increase efficiency. The result: high profit margins and better consumer satisfaction. 

But how do you actually make such improvements? In this section, we’ll discuss strategies that have been proven to drive efficiency and ensure success.

Integrate ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software into your operations

Forget about manual processes involving spreadsheets and hand counts. These are tools of the past and are preventing small businesses from growing. 

By making an investment in an ERP system, your business can more effectively manage inventory levels, track products throughout the supply chain, and operate order-to-cash processes from a single system. 

Automate manual tasks

Manual tasks are prone to error and can be super time-consuming. It’s therefore better for businesses to automate as many tasks as they can. Automation frees up time to work on strategy, leaving the more tedious tasks like counting to software. 

Besides the amount of time saved, automation ensures accuracy and precision in the inventory collection monitoring process. This translates to more profit and a better consumer experience, especially for small and medium sized businesses who don’t have resources to waste. 

Automation also provides supply chain managers with real-time data on lot sizes, meaning that inventory levels are always up to date. Real-time inventory totals help to inform future decision making and prevent wastage and overstock. 

Barcode scanning and Radio Frequency Identification (RFI) are two specific tools your business may need. Barcode scanning helps to scan in inventory fast, providing real-time updates on stock levels, while RFI automates warehouse control, reducing manual error and time.

Make use of demand planning

Use demand planning tools to remove the guesswork from inventory buying, ultimately helping to purchase accurate product levels. 

Never again will you have to worry about ordering the correct amount of stock. The automated system of a demand planning tool will make use of historical trends and market data, ultimately forecasting optimal product levels. 

Leverage data and analytics

Accurate and real-time data and analysis can set you apart from the competitors. Using analytics, you can increase customer satisfaction by purchasing what consumers really want.

Ultimately, you can predict optimal quantities, reduce wastage and product discounting, and promote safety and freshness control with data-backed inventory trends.

The best inventory management solution

Silo’s Inventory Management is an all-in-one business management platform designed to help wholesale perishable food distributors to thrive in a modern and increasingly competitive marketplace. 

Silo's connected suite of cloud-based tools automates workflows, optimizes communication across teams, and eliminates inefficiencies that cost time, money, and error that induces stress.

Silo arms its users with real-time data insights to ensure buyers, inventory managers, and salespersons are equipped with the information they need to make smart decisions and optimize what matters most - loss reduction, revenue generation, and opportunity creation.

In addition to tracking your products, you can also monitor expenses, invoices, and inventory reports, all with Silo’s software. Benefit from greater visibility for inbound and outbound orders. In the event of a recall, Silo's lot tracking technology makes it easy to trace products from origin to destination and comply with public safety protocols.

Competing with the big corporations can be challenging for businesses of any size. Small and medium-sized businesses have found great use in Silo, as it’s market trends, intelligent pricing, and historical data give businesses a competitive edge in more accurately predicting how much inventory to purchase and what to sell it at. 

Reduce the risk of waste and remove the guesswork. Choose Silo and book a demo today!