At this time of the year, most retailers are focused on the Christmas sales rush, but quite often, many manufacturing and distribution businesses deal with fluctuating stock volumes throughout the year. Your business needs to have the ability to scale fast to meet customer demands. Being prepared for peak fulfilment gives you the opportunity to reassess your current processes, consider staffing requirements and look at new ways to manage inventory. Not only will this help your business during the busy Christmas rush, but it will also help your business to prepare for future seasonal spikes.
More productive staffing can help meet peak fulfilment demands
Many manufacturers find it necessary to employ seasonal staff throughout the year, not just before and during the festive season. It can be difficult to find a reliable seasonal workforce.
If you’re struggling to find good staff, how can you fulfil more orders with fewer employees?
To increase productivity, businesses should consider automation, especially in the picking and stock replenishment process. Speeding up fulfilment provides a competitive advantage, and enables your business to meet deadlines or guarantee next-day delivery.
If you’ve implemented new automation processes, such as barcodes and scanners, make sure your current employees understand the system or get the right training to improve their job performance. This will increase workplace productivity, reduce the risk of human error and get your orders out the door on time.
Just In Case (JIC) inventory is your new best friend
With the supply chain disruptions we’ve witnessed over the last two years, it’s inevitable that your business’s inventory isn’t in a perfect state. The unpredictability caused by COVID-19 has proved it’s better to be on top of your inventory management.
Keeping additional, Just In Case (JIC) inventory might be the best way to go this festive season. Of course, relying on JIC inventory depends on what products your business manufactures or distributes. As JIC inventory comes with some risks – excess unsold stock or raw materials with short expiry dates, plus finding the space to store stock.
But if there’s a spike in demand, and your business has got the goods, customers will turn to you for sales, giving you the competitive edge and guaranteeing your reputation as a trusted supplier.
Keep your customers happy
To keep clients coming back, your business needs to provide excellent service and delivery. There’s never been a more important time to prove your business is up to the post-pandemic challenge, getting orders out faster and accurately, will earn you repeat business.
But as orders increase, you need to ramp up your fulfilment, and quite often, this means managing returns.
Automation will not only benefit your business in the quieter seasons, but it will enable you to scale quickly to manage the seasonal influx of orders and potential returns as well.
Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems offer scalability to meet the changing needs of your business. Using an ERP with trained staff, enables your business to pick and return orders faster.
As a MYOB Advanced Platinum Partner, we’ve helped businesses overcome issues and become more profitable. We can help optimise, automate and improve the scalability in your business. Acacia has the knowledge and experience across a range of businesses to provide the most cost-effective solution for your business.
If you are interested in talking through the advantages of using a cloud ERP to scale your business, contact us and one of our consultants will be in touch soon.
