If getting products to your customers on time is the heart of your business, good inventory management is the rib cage that protects it. Managing inventory accurately and efficiently has long been a challenge across industries. The problem only gets harder to solve when you add more variables in the form of multiple warehouse and store locations.
With growing businesses needing to make shipping and delivery efficient for their customers, spreadsheets are no longer a feasible option for accurately tracking inventory stored in multiple places. Whether you’re working with a few storage units, dozens of stores, or hundreds of warehouses, advanced multi locations inventory management software and strategies right-size inventory for every locale.
What Is Multi-Location Inventory Management?
Multi-location inventory management is the complex process of recording, storing, moving, and replenishing inventory across more than one store or warehouse. Oftentimes, this involves tracking inventory across every step of the supply chain to avoid low stock, stockouts, or overstock.
For companies with more than a single warehouse, knowing what inventory is at which location, how inventory moves between sites, and when specific locations are experiencing stocking challenges is very difficult. Optimized multi-location inventory practices aim to centralize and standardize management to ease efforts across multiple facilities.
Key Challenges of Managing Inventory Across Multiple Locations
In supply chain planning, strategists must balance having enough inventory to satisfy customers without running out of space. That’s complicated enough with multiple products in one facility. Add in several other locations, and you significantly amp up the complexity of forecasting, tracking, and stocking for right-size inventory programs.
The most common inventory management concerns for dealing with multiple locations include:
- Production and Logistical Complexity: Supplying thousands of products that have to move across thousands of miles to multiple locations is an immensely complicated undertaking. Without the right tools for optimization, it’s easy for your company to waste time, space, and sales opportunities.
- Lack of Communication: When different stores and facilities are operating in silos ad using their own manual processes to track inventory, miscommunications and inaccuracies are common occurrences. This provides obstacles when it comes to ensuring precise daily inventory records that you can compare across all locations.
- Unexpected Demand Spikes: If you don’t have advanced forecasting capabilities in every area, demand shifts are more likely to catch teams by surprise. A disconnected system also makes it harder for professionals to problem-solve when customer preferences change suddenly.
- Supply Chain Uncertainty: When your supply chain gets interrupted by occurrences out of your control, your entire inventory system can become ineffective overnight. All it takes is one key supplier being late on a shipment, and all your careful planning goes out the window.
In addition, consumers are now used to better and more immediate service. Proximity to customers is essential for the convenient overnight shipping options many consumers have come to expect. Using inventory software to track items in two locations or more allows workers to quickly source the nearest inventory when they run into a low-stock or out-of-stock scenario, allowing for faster delivery and better customer relationships.
It’s clear — multi-location policies that haven’t been revisited in years lead to misaligned inventory levels and increased carrying costs. Addressing these issues with advanced algorithms and real-time inventory insights unlocks substantial profitability gains in both the short term and the long term.
Best Practices for Multi-Location Inventory Management
Implement a results-driven strategy for multi locations inventory management with best practices from the experts at GAINSystems.
The Role of Centralized Inventory Management Systems
Streamline operations and improve efficiency by centralizing inventory management and procurement across every location. Keep your purchasing roles clear to avoid duplication or overstocking, then solidify all planning underneath one scalable software solution.
A cloud-based product allows for seamless collaboration and enhanced accessibility throughout all inventory locations. Easily add and track multiple inventories per product based on locations, stores, warehouses, suppliers, and more.
Users across locations will get real-time visibility into inventory levels not just at their facility, but at every step of their supply chain and in nearby stores and warehouses. The cloud system will notify warehouse managers of any upcoming shortages as soon as information becomes available. With a quick method for checking which facility has which products, workers will also know who to contact for additional inventory in a pinch.
Leveraging Real-Time Inventory Tracking & AI Optimization
Right products, right place, right time. It’s an adage every CSCO finds familiar, but how can you actually achieve it? AI-powered inventory optimization and real-time tracking move your business one step closer to your goals.
Advanced tools allow you to incorporate valuable external data into your planning, giving you real-time visibility into all factors affecting inventory. Learn about market signals, customer behavior shifts, and changing lead times as they happen so you can adjust strategies to seamlessly meet new challenges.
Ultimately, real-time data empowers companies to take a more dynamic approach to multi-location inventory models for retail supply chain management. Having a better informed and more agile inventory decision-making process leads to greater logistics efficiency, better customer satisfaction, and lower expedited shipping expenses for businesses.
Standardizing Procedures Across Multiple Warehouses
Having workers handle inventory differently across stores and warehouses simply isn’t scalable in complex supply chains. Automation streamlines inventory management processes, making them more efficient and standardized at every product touchpoint.
Make sure your warehouse operations include clear and consistent approval methods for purchasing and restocking across locations. You can also streamline approvals and avoid delays by using the same technology in all relevant spaces.
By using robust inventory management software, you can make sure every warehouse location knows what to stock and when. GAINS facilitates collaboration between multiple locations and every stakeholder — from shippers to carriers to warehouse managers — ensuring optimal alignment.
Training Staff for Efficient Multi-Location Inventory Control
As you make improvements to your inventory management processes, help staff embrace change through comprehensive training. Provide interactive training and implementation opportunities for management to encourage their buy-in and participation in new systems.
Create and reinforce standard operating procedures surrounding inventory management so you can easily compare accurate inventory records from one location to the next. During and after implementation, encourage feedback from workers to keep them engaged with the system and find opportunities to enhance its effectiveness.
Measuring Performance & Success in Multi-Location Inventory Management
Once it’s in operation, your inventory management tool will give you a clear executive picture of what is or isn’t working. To ensure profitable inventory management, track important metrics such as:
- Product Stocking: If your system is working well, the number of out-of-stock, low-stock, and overstock products should decline.
- Expediting Shipping Expenses: The amount your business has to pay in expedited shipping costs to meet demand upswings or solve supply issues should also decrease as the new system is integrated.
- Improving System Accuracy: You should find fewer inconsistencies in your inventory records across locations once you centralize inventory operations under standardized methods within a single tool.
Conduct regular audits and reviews to identify continuous improvement opportunities and ensure efficiency. At GAINS, we recommend starting with small changes that carry big impacts. Then, you can pursue a complete software implementation that capitalizes on program strengths and targets weaknesses to continue producing benefits over time.
Smarter Multi-Location Inventory Management with GAINS
Using leading multi location inventory management software from GAINS, your business can:
- Leverage advanced modeling and algorithms for more accurate inventory planning
- Enhance your responsiveness to customers’ shifting needs and preferences
- Balance the inventory demands of your finance and sales teams and justify all relevant decisions with data
- Deliver products seamlessly with the right inventory at the right place and time
Gain a high-level network view that aligns inventory flow with your service level and cost savings goals. See how GAINS gives you a 360-degree view of inventory at every location.
FAQs: Multi Locations Inventory Management Explained
Are you in a rush? Get straightforward answers to your most crucial questions about multi-location inventory management below.
What is multi-location management?
Multi-location management means tracking and replenishing inventory levels across warehouses and stores in different locations. The standardization of purchasing procedures and implementation of a cloud-based advanced inventory tool both contribute to more effective management in multiple locations.
How to manage inventory across multiple locations?
Manual inventory management processes often break down under the pressure of scaling to multiple locations. Automated cloud-based software enables supply chain professionals to better predict demand and get real-time visibility into which products are stocked in which places and when.
What is the multi-location inventory feature?
When you are using GAINS to streamline your supply chain management, our multi-location inventory feature enables you to track different inventories of the same product in multiple locations. By using this feature, you can improve the accuracy of your inventory records across stores and warehouses, helping each facility avoid low-stock, overstock, or stockout situations.
