|
In business settings, the term inventory can refer to one of three things – the act of making a list of accumulated goods and items owned by a company, the list itself, or the actual goods and items. An enterprise usually devotes significant time and resources to track and secure inventory. This is because these objects are considered fixed assets and any undocumented loss or damage represents a wasted opportunity. Keeping an inventory of goods is not limited to manufacturing firms. Even service oriented companies have accumulated assets that they need to keep track of religiously. This may involve something as simple as office and bathroom supplies to high-ticket items like company cars and cutting-edge equipment. There are a few common reasons why smart businesses prefer to set aside and keep caches of material. The realities of business make it clear that time lags and delay are inevitable at some point. There is no company in existence that is able to keep to a perfect schedule a hundred percent of the time. Having a stash of items to utilize during supply chain hold-ups can be invaluable in certain situations. It lets operations continue normally despite lack of resources. The economies of scale dictate that purchasing items singly and only when needed tend to be inefficient. Logistics have proven that these methods incur significant losses in effort, time and work efficiency. Large volume inventory handling is thus instituted in order to combat this tendency. While market conditions can be anticipated, there is no foolproof way to accurately predict how it’s going to behave. Demand and supply for all goods and services can fall, rise or cease altogether at any point. Certain inventory handling strategies are useful to hedge your bets against the dangers of uncertainty. Individual workers or branches sometimes employ creative inventory handling techniques during periods of company changeovers and other moments of shutdown. This allows them to maintain a certain level of functionality through tough times from the product buffer they’ve accumulated. Any unusable excess becomes unnecessary if Single-Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) or One-Touch Exchange of Die (OTED) methods are used correctly.
Related Articles -
inventory, handling,
| 
