Inventory Management

We offer your online business a secure, safe and accurate solution for your inventory management and logistics services. Invenco is a 3PL specialist. We are the professional eCommerce logistics and inventory management service that houses your products, picks and packs your orders and ships them direct to your customers. Let us do the hard work of order fulfillment and save on the costs of inventory and warehousing by using a single service provider who does the complete process.

If supplying your customers from your online store is causing you headaches, and you think you’re spending too much on freight and warehousing, then that’s where we can help. We manage the entire end to end process of your customer orders. When a customer orders something from your online store, that order arrives at our centrally located warehouse where your goods are stored. We pick and pack and ship that order direct to your customer. You don’t lift a finger. The entire process happens automatically via integrated systems which speak to one another in real time. This means that you’re free to do what you do best and seek out new business opportunities, manage your sales and forecasting accurately, and relax during the busy seasonal periods. Centrally located warehousing in major cities like Sydney and Melbourne also offer more competitive shipping opportunities which means you can maintain consistent shipping across all of your products for all of your customers in Australia.

If you’re new to warehousing and inventory management, then it may not be clear yet how much Invenco can help your business. Here, we’ll go through some broader inventory management concepts and explain a bit about why Invenco is the smarter choice for small to medium sized businesses who operate mainly online.

Whatever you sell and ship to your customers counts as inventory. Your inventory is stored in a warehouse which is generally large commercial premises designed to house a lot of different things of varying sizes. Often small to medium sized businesses are operating out of warehouse premises that are too small or too large for what they actually need. It’s difficult to capture an accurate scale of your operations because the nature of the market varies. Keeping warehousing space small ensures lower overhead costs for the running of your business, but it can impact in other ways. It may mean that you do not carry enough stock in your warehouse to fulfil your customer’s orders or it may mean that you keep too much of the slower moving stock items.

To ensure that your inventory levels are correct, everything that you send to your customers and everything that you order from your suppliers must be accounted for. The inventory that you currently hold is called stock on hand. The amount of stock on hand shows you what is available for your customers to order.

To accurately manage your stock levels, an inventory management system should be in place. This system should integrate with your online ordering software so that your customers have instant visibility into what is currently available and what might be backordered or placed on order for fulfillment once your latest shipment arrives at your warehouse.

Inventory management is the accurate management of your supply chain. That means that your holding inventory – the amount you currently have on the shelf and available for sale – is accurate and you really do have that number of products available. It also means that you can accurately forecast for new orders or shipments to meet customer demand.

Invenco is a third party logistics provider so we house your stock levels for you and look after your complete supply chain management. Our stock inventory system integrates seamlessly with most eCommerce platforms so that when you choose Invenco, your online available or amounts of inventory are exactly what is available in our warehouse for sale.

We use barcode systems which act as a unique identifiers of your business’ stock inventory. When an order from your website appears on our picking and packing cue, the professional picker knows exactly where your goods are located in the warehouse and is able to accurately pick the order from your customer. Once it has been picked and shipped, the item is taken out of the system so you know how much you need to order to replenish your stock and maintain good inventory levels.

Maintaining your inventory is about ensuring that the stock you have in your warehouse or manufacturing plant is accurate. Not only does good inventory management rely on completing customer orders accurately, it also includes regular stock takes. This is the process where physical products are hand-counted by warehouse staff to ensure that the stock levels in your financial management system are accurate. It’s a labour intensive process but only by physically counting your stock levels and comparing them with your inventory management software will you be able to isolate potential areas for supply chain errors or mismanagement. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can close the warehouse down and count everything at the same time or you can cycle count the inventory, row by row or shelf by shelf.

The ABC analysis method for stock control means categorising your inventory into three groups: A group is items with tight controls and accurate records, B group is less tightly controlled items and good records, and C group is the simplest controls and minimal records.

Work in process inventory is about stock that will become available. It’s the stock that is awaiting completion and is not yet ready for sale and may include things like raw materials. Finished goods or finished products are what should be counted as stock on hand but when it comes to requirement planning and ordering new stock levels, your work in process inventory need to also be accounted for. For example, work in process inventory should be counted during stocktakes along with the rest of your stock.

Good inventory management will also include a pre-planned reorder point. When your stock levels reach a certain number, which will depend on how quickly that particular item sells, an economic order quantity (EOQ) should be automatically ordered. This ensures that the item is constantly available for order by your customers and there will be no disruption between supply and demand. This is also known as vendor managed inventory.

For perishable inventory with a limited shelf life, it’s important that a cycle inventory in operation management system is established. This will ensure that items with a shorter shelf life are picked and dispatched before the same items with a longer shelf date.

By engaging Invenco, we can help you to accurately manage the cost of goods that are in process, are currently held in inventory and what you have actually sold and distributed. Our inventory management system will integrate seamlessly with your own database giving you instant visibility into what you actually have, holding costs for maintaining it and then inform accurate pricing models so that you know exactly how much money your business makes for every one of the items that it sells.

A third party inventory and supply management service like Invenco is designed to remove the stress and hassle out of running your online business. We are supply chain management professionals which means that the timely, safe and cheap inventory management and distribution of your products is what we do.

To find out how Invenco can help your business, chat with one of our consultants today. We can take you through our inventory management process and how simply and intuitively it integrates with your online store.