Streamline Operations with Multichannel Inventory Software

If you’re responsible for a heavy-duty repair shop, you already know how difficult handling your business’ inventory can be. It’s practically a full-time job.

It might even be a full-time job if you’re responsible if you have more than one location to take care of. That’s where things really get tricky, since it requires you to deal with a truly overwhelming amount of information.

Fortunately, multichannel inventory management software can help simplify this process. Read on for our complete explanation of this powerful software and how it can make life easier for you—no matter how many locations your shop has.

What is Multichannel Inventory Management Software?

The fundamentals of inventory management software aren’t hard to understand. In fact, this term is downright self-explanatory: it describes programs that can tell you exactly how many parts you have in stock and where these parts are located in your shop.

Naturally, having more than one storefront can complicate the process of inventory tracking—and not every inventory management program on the market will be able to keep up. In this situation, you’ll need to know for a fact that you have access to multichannel inventory management software for your shop.

Multichannel inventory management software functions like any other inventory management program, but it’s explicitly designed for use across multiple locations and sales channels. With the help of one of these web-based programs, you’ll be able to track stock levels across all your storefronts or mobile repair trucks, no matter where you are. Thus, these systems are a must for heavy-duty repair shops with more than one storefront—or which plan to expand.

Key Benefits of Multichannel Inventory Management Software

When you adopt the right multichannel inventory management program for your RV repair shop (or any other type of heavy-duty repair shop), you’ll enjoy benefits such as:

Improved Accuracy

Though inventory management software comes with all sorts of key features, its single most obvious benefit may be its ability to give shop employees instant updates on inventory levels. With access to that information, these workers will have no questions about their shop’s stock situation. And since these systems often work with barcode scanners, there’s a near-zero possibility of human error while tracking these parts. (We say near-zero because human error, uh, finds a way.)

Inventory software can also assist in the process of cycle counting. Technically, inventory software can’t eliminate this best practice—you’ll still need to complete this task when you first receive parts, among other occasions. Still, it can greatly simplify this job and allow you to view accurate inventory levels between cycle counts.

Time Savings

If you don’t have a digital system for parts management, your techs will need to spend valuable time manually entering data and looking around your shop for the parts they need. Which is time consuming. That’s a non-issue with inventory management software, which allows workers to track and find parts with a quick scan/mobile device check, respectively.

This heightened efficiency also applies to reordering parts. If you find a truly powerful inventory management platform, you’ll be able to get in touch with vendors and create new purchase orders within your inventory program, making the ordering process as painless as possible. Better yet, some systems in this category can send you automated reminders whenever you need to place another order.

Cost Reduction

When your techs don’t need to spend valuable time searching for parts, you’ll eliminate a huge source of inefficiency and wasted labor hours. Along with that, inventory management processes can help you order the exact number of parts your shop needs—no more, no less. Beyond that, tracking your stock levels with one of these systems can help you protect your inventory and cut down on parts losses.

As if that wasn’t enough, the best inventory management systems on the market can even help optimize your parts pricing. When your inventory software can assist you with parts margins, parts matrices, and markup percentages, you can avoid the possibility of losing money on underpriced parts.

Enhanced Customer Experience

At a heavy-duty repair shop, the only thing less enjoyable than putting a customer’s job on hold due to stock issues is your inventory software becoming sentient and taking over your business—something we’ve been…encouraged…to say almost never happens.

The point is, the information provided by inventory management software will give your staff members a chance to reorder parts well before you run the risk of a stockout.

If your inventory system of choice offers features that go beyond the inventory management basics, you’ll be able to improve your customer communication in other ways while using this software. For example, you may be able to share live updates on repairs with your customers, keeping them fully informed along the way.

Multiply the Benefits of Inventory Management Software

Whether your heavy-duty repair shop has one location or a dozen, inventory management can be a hassle. You deserve multichannel inventory management software that can help you save time and money, accurately track part levels and locations, and better serve your customers. (And you deserve a glass of wine tonight, too! You’ve been working hard lately. We can tell.)

At Fullbay, we take pride in offering the best inventory management program in the industry. Our software helps with parts management by including all the features and benefits described in this article. But that isn’t all it does—it also comes with additional capabilities such as workflow management, reporting, and employee onboarding. Get a full explanation of how Fullbay can help your shop by scheduling a demo today!