Today I wanted to focus on one area that’s regularly mentioned by our clients – stock management. How easy is it to ensure that your workforce have the required uniform & PPE, when they need it? Many organisations are wasting precious resources because they either don’t have an efficient system to cope with the intricacies, or worse still, are doing things manually. Don’t fall into this trap!
To understand how to solve the issue, we need to delve a little deeper. There are several, often competing, challenges when ensuring stock is at optimum levels. Do you recognise any of the below situations?
1. It’s difficult to manage uniform requirements with the volume of new starters.
2. It’s time-consuming chasing new employees for their sizing information to ensure you have the right uniform for their start date.
3. You want to take advantage of bulk buying, or supplier discounts, but don’t have the warehouse space to store all sizes/wardrobes.
4. You don’t have visibility of your supplier(s) stock levels, so can’t guarantee when stock will be available.
Managing budget, space and employee expectations is impossible without a sophisticated system that deals with these competing challenges.
The Solution
The easiest way to understand the volume and complexity of uniform orders, is to have a real-time solution that staff can use to manage their requirements. Employees themselves are best to complete this information, knowing their unique requests, and can be guided by role-specific wardrobes and allowances to ensure they have their full complement of garments. A uniform management system manages these requests in real time and automatically ensures all stock issues are forward planned.
2. Connect To Supplier(s) ERP System(s) OR Use an Inventory Management System
If you don’t already have a system that connects with your supplier’s ERP (stock) system, you should investigate if this is possible. It’s a game-changer to be able to see in real-time what stock your supplier has available. It’s also useful to see what lead times are on out-of-stock items.
Alternatively, you may wish to stock and store garments in house. The easiest way to ensure workwear is in place for staff is to have an accurate digital record of the stock that you hold. Maybe have a solution in-house already? To maximise that, you can seamlessly connect it to the ordering platform and account for orders placed by staff in real-time.
The Inventory Management feature in
Smart Red’s platform allows you to maintain minimum levels of each size/style of garment, whilst also dealing with bulk ordering discounts from different suppliers. This drastically reduces human error and capitalises on savings whilst maintaining manageable inventory levels.
3. Connect With Your People Management Software
Take advantage of the technology that already exists in your business, by connecting it to your Uniform Management Software. If your HR Department control start dates and new employee communication through software, it makes sense to control uniform stock with it too. Full requirements can be completed in the employee’s own time, ensuring they have everything ready for them starting, and eliminates the wasteful manual intervention by HR and Administrative staff.
Smart Red
Smart Red, the Uniform Management Software that allows you to connect with virtually any external system required, will help you manage stock levels, whilst keeping your employees compliant and happy.
Contact us today to discuss how quickly we can help you.