NetSuite Inventory Management Overview

Inventory management is an irreplaceable part of your total supply chain. It helps determine how much stock is on your shelves, establish correct shipment estimates, and plan purchase orders. Poorly managed inventory operations might leave you in the dark. Inventory management in NetSuite allows you to keep track of your inventory, optimize safety supply, cut costs, and more.

NetSuite Inventory Management includes powerful warehousing features that give you complete control over your item distribution workflow. You can establish unique multi-location warehouses with automatic replenishment capabilities within the system using the inventory management software. Here's a quick run-down of how NetSuite can help.

Reasons to Integrate NetSuite Inventory Management

Users of NetSuite gain so much in terms of improved inventory management and avoiding stock-outs. NetSuite can handle all aspects of your organization. Still, being a modern cloud-based system, it excels at tracking stock goods regardless of their physical location. Inventory management solutions in NetSuite enable you to better determine when to restock stock, plan for product demand, and get it to your consumers quickly.

The benefits of NetSuite's unified inventory management solutions don't stop there; they also help with sales and profitability in the following ways:

1. Improved perspective on your inventory

NetSuite inventory management gives you complete visibility into stock levels across all of your locations, allowing you to optimize your pick, pack, and ship processes. Plus, using pre-defined rules, you may automatically ship orders depending on whole-order inventory availability and location, avoiding numerous shipments and additional expenditures.

2. No stock-outs

Inventory management software from NetSuite can also help you increase sales and reduce stock-outs. Users of NetSuite may now proactively monitor stock levels and sell-throughs. Thanks to the increased visibility, they can shift goods across locations to ensure inventory availability and decrease needless inventory. As a result, firms can keep inventory levels where they need to be while improving operations and lowering costs.

3. 360-degree view of inventory 

Providing the best possible client experience often necessitates anticipating demand. Inventory demand might fluctuate for various reasons, including interest, seasonality, and many other considerations. NetSuite inventory management provides a comprehensive view of revenues, lead times, and replenishment times, allowing firms to manage optimal stock levels dynamically. Additionally, you can choose to integrate automatic notifications to notify the purchasing manager when stock needs to be adjusted to keep prime stock levels in check.

4. Keeping track of warehouses

Many businesses nowadays have multiple warehouses in various locations. This is convenient for shipping and delivery, but it might be inconvenient for tracking and keeping products.

If you stock and sell in several locations, having visibility into stock levels across all locations is critical for optimizing inventory usage and getting products to customers as quickly as possible. Inventory management software allows you to establish pre-defined parameters which send orders to the place with all products available. This helps avoid numerous shipments and higher shipping costs.

Stores can also be set up as locations in NetSuite Inventory Management, giving you a complete enterprise-wide inventory view. You can proactively manage stock levels with insight into inventory across all locations, shifting products between locations as needed to assure inventory availability and decrease obsolete inventory.

5. Accurate tracking

Factors such as a large number of raw materials and suppliers can make tracing products over their full lifecycle extremely challenging. NetSuite, thankfully, includes lot and serial tracking tools for connecting completed goods to suppliers and raw materials. Businesses may better establish fulfillment strategies, use forward and backward tracing, and use FEFO to manage inventories with these functionalities.

In other words, traceability ensures that inventory items can be tracked using a serial number or lot number. This may allow for real-time product visibility. NetSuite inventory management understands all transaction-related data and displays it on a screen for everyone to see.

6. Precise inventory count

Businesses can use cycle counting to ensure accuracy, catch inventory problems, and prevent theft before it happens. Regular cycle counting is essential to maintain accurate stock levels and implement checks and balances. NetSuite inventory management allows you to plan frequent periodic item counts and assign counts to floor employees automatically. By incorporating these practices into everyday tasks, you can verify that all of your products are accounted for and avoid warehouse operations disturbance.

NetSuite can assist you in automating the restocking process to avoid stock-outs. However, determining the ideal stocking levels would be impossible without reliable and frequent inventory counts. The Inventory Count feature in NetSuite invites you to count things and allows you to categorize inventory based on transaction volume, value, or both. 

You can also lower your costs by reducing the amount of safety stock you need to keep on hand. You can enter frequent stock counts to verify the amount of inventory you have is as precise as possible while these operations are automated.

7. Inventory replenishment

With automatic replacement features, NetSuite inventory management ensures sustained client happiness. Simply set minimum inventory levels for each item, and the software will restock supplies for you before you run out.

Maintaining the proper amount of inventory to satisfy anticipated requests while keeping surplus stock to a minimum is critical for customer satisfaction and profitability. NetSuite counteracts this by automating the process and identifying optimum stocking levels. The order items list contains suggestions, and rules can be defined to take action once a threshold is reached.

NetSuite inventory management enables demand-based replenishment by dynamically managing item reorder points based on historical and seasonal sales. It also takes into account the average lead time and the number of days' supply to stock data.

Automated replenishment capabilities ensure that you're always ready to satisfy client demand, resulting in simple and accurate distribution procedures.

8. ERP system integration

NetSuite inventory management is part of the Netsuite ERP suite. As a result, it's entirely compatible with the rest of NetSuite's modules, such as finance, manufacturing, supply chain, and procurement tools. The program's website has a complete list of integrated modules and sub-modules.

Benefits to Gain from NetSuite Inventory Management

You can run your company on one cloud platform using NetSuite inventory management technologies to streamline your business procedures. NetSuite is built for production and distribution, with modules that cover the entire supply chain from beginning to end.

Given those facts, the following is a list of benefits you stand to gain:

• Customizable reporting: NetSuite has pre-built reports as well as the flexibility to create your own. You may personalize your results by using criteria like specific accounts, transaction details, and more. The information provided is accurate and runs in real-time.

• Real-time accessible data: Up to date data is always accessible across your organization. This ensures that your employees get an accurate picture of how your company is operating. You can also set up alerts to warn you when inventory levels dip below a given threshold or where a product is in the supply chain. The Supply Chain Control Tower feature allows you to proactively monitor inventory, demand, and supply across your global supply chain.

• Reduced cost: NetSuite can help you detect costs linked to supplier pricing, processing, and more, in addition to enhanced warehouse practices and product tracking.

Planning Implementation of NetSuite Inventory Management

This particular topic deserves a whole other blog of its own. There are many things to consider and a lot of factors to remember regarding NetSuite implementation. For this, we will go through a surface-level run-down to give you a basic idea of what it takes to integrate NetSuite inventory management into your system.

While NetSuite implementations are often thought to be less complicated than other ERP projects, putting together a detailed plan is still essential. For the highest possibility of success with your project, we recommend planning around specific areas. 

Project planning, data conversion, testing, training, and support are the steps you must take for NetSuite implementation. 

Summary

Companies that use NetSuite's Inventory Management system instead of pen and paper obtain a better grasp of inventory and how it's distributed. Businesses can feasibly implement a demand-based production strategy, keeping less stock on hand and lowering storage overhead expenses.

NetSuite inventory management allows you to fine-tune your warehousing operations to the nth degree. Within the system, you can establish bespoke locations with bins and shelves. It guarantees continual customer pleasure with automatic replenishment capabilities so that you’ll never have to turn clients away because you’re out of stock. It also comes with full integrations with the rest of the Netsuite ERP product line.

Thanks to comprehensive inventory management software, Netsuite Inventory Management could be a good investment. It is definitely recommended to get NetSuite if you think your company could profit from a more streamlined warehouse