The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted many loopholes in businesses across the globe. Common challenges include unpredictable customer behavior, unreliable inventory supplies, downfall of demands, rising costs, and everyday inventory management challenges.
One major thing that needs to be optimal in the repair business is Inventory Management. It has lots of moving parts that make it more complicated than it may seem. Even the smallest changes can affect your margins. The key is to know the challenges before the holiday season and devise solutions for them when they arise.
We can already see that repair businesses are adopting new norms to continue their operations, and are responding quickly to these issues to stay one step ahead of their competition. So, with many moving pieces and parts, how can your business avoid inventory management problems?
We answer that question in detail below – read on!
Get the Complete Picture of Your Inventory
Do you know how many purchase orders you have inline and when they are expected to arrive? How many of your items go to shelves or become safety stock? Having full visibility of your inventory at all times will ensure a safe business.
From a supplier to a customer, knowledge of your stock directly impacts how you control your inventory. You need to be aware of your real-time inventory levels to avoid significant problems, such as backorders and products going out of stock.
You can use RepairDesk to set stock warning and reorder levels and know when you are running out of parts. Handling this process manually can be cumbersome, so switching over to an automated inventory management system will help you see the bigger picture.
I Want to Know More About Inventory Management
Work on Correct Data Insights
Having access to your sales data is one thing – understanding and making the fullest use of that data is something else altogether. Before strategizing your marketing efforts for Black Friday, reconsider your sales from the previous year and derive results from it.
For instance, it can be helpful to know how much of a particular item you have at any given time. But it’s also immensely useful to see that item’s demand during the holiday season. A repair shop owner must be aware of any changes to a product’s demand over time, across channels, between multiple stores, and so on.
Being able to spot the right trends or capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities is the perfect way to win this holiday season.
Maintain a Multi-Location Warehouse to the Cloud
Running repair stores at multiple locations can help you provide more affordable and faster shipping to customers and make region-popular items more accessible. However, it can be problematic when you transfer inventory items between stores and forget about noting it down.
That’s where RepairDesk can help you out!
Manage all of your stores effortlessly from a single platform, view important reports, know when you’re out-of-stock and where you need to order more products to create a win-win situation for your cellphone repair store. Get yourselves and the team ready with a FREE trial of our cloud-based POS system.
Sign Up for a 14-day FREE Trial!
Save Time by Automating Inventory Management
Several repair businesses are still stuck in the stone age. Some are one-store-specific, operating with Excel-based inventory management, which is inefficient. It can spell certain death if they do not scale up or automate rapidly while going online!
Not only is it obsolete, tedious, and time-consuming, but the sheer potential for human errors is also staggering. In contrast, automation allows employees to track SKUs across all your stores while monitoring orders, returns, exchanges, and shipments for all your items; that too in real-time. Automation also makes it easy to perform routine tasks like generating barcodes, invoices, or purchase orders.
If you name your products and SKUs correctly, you will be able to standardize inventory management to a great extent.Â
Build a Reliable Relationship with Vendors
It may seem like a no-brainer, but not building a good working relationship with your suppliers is also a widespread issue.
Finding a good and reliable repair parts vendor is a careful balance between consistency and someone who doesn’t charge a bomb. Luckily, we have recently gathered a list of the best cellphone/computer parts suppliers to help you find the best match and forget about everything else.
Tell Me About the Best Suppliers
If you’d like to make some savings yourself, check out our Black Friday offer on the RepairDesk Retail Toolkit. You’ll be getting a bunch of great hardware and software in one convenient package, saving big this holiday season. It’s the perfect time to get our toolkit and start your repair journey.
I Want the Black Friday Offer
If you’re looking for the best solution for all your repair store needs, consider signing up for RepairDesk. RepairDesk is an all-in-one repair shop management system that makes it easier for you to take care of everything at your repair shop. Create tickets, process invoices, collect customer signatures, order your inventory online, and book appointments right, all in one place.
