Inventory Management & Your Overhead Conveyor
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Many companies look at inventory management in fairly simple terms.
- Have the right amount of inventory
- Replenish inventory at the right time
That’s basically it. Of course, the reality of doing those two seemingly simple things is anything but simple. But it’s a mistake to think of your inventory only in terms of maintaining stock levels and here’s why.
The Cost of Managing Inventory
The reasons you want to maintain stock levels that are just high enough to meet your customers’ demands. With a little safety buffer for ‘emergency’ orders, isn’t just because of the cost of your inventory. It’s also because of the cost of managing your inventory.
Think about it. In addition to the cost of extra inventory, you’ll have the following costs when you’re overstocked.
- Warehouse space
- Labour to store and retrieve the inventory
- Administration costs of managing the added inventory
- More inventory shrinkage, degradation, and obsolescence
- Added insurance and more capital tied up in inventory that’s just sitting on a shelf.
But, even as detailed a breakdown as that list is, it still doesn’t cover all the costs of managing your inventory. If there is one cost of inventory management that many businesses fail to consider more than any other, it is how much they spend in moving inventory around their facility.
Thinking of floor space alone, imagine how much of that valuable square footage you would chew up to install a conventional conveyor system throughout your warehouse. Think about how the other traffic in your warehouse would be affected by that floor-based system. And think about how quickly your product would get from loading dock to shelf and back along the floor, having to follow a certain path, versus taking a more direct route.
Now think about an overhead conveyor which doesn’t need floor space, won’t interfere with floor traffic and will get your inventory where it’s going in as direct a route as possible.
If you’re ready to lower the costs of managing your inventory, call us here at Bridgeveyor. We designed and manufacture the original, North American-made C-250™ Overhead Conveyor line.
