A cycle count means a small amount of inventory is counted by a particular day without a full manual inventory.
Good practices for inventory counting
How much you count and the amount of inventory you count depends on the types of items you sell and on the resources available to you. For instance, you can conduct an ABC inventory analysis to evaluate the products in your class A and rely more frequently on your highest value products than your other products.
Irrespective of the particular approach to inventory statistics, here are several best practices:
- Count one category at a time – ideally, you want to rotate the entire inventory over a period. It is safer to concentrate on one class at a time, so that during business hours you can count effectively and not be impeded by the run-off times.
- Choose seasonality-based categories – The purpose of the inventory count is to correct any inventory differences as they arise. It is better to count items at their peak to ensure that any problems can be addressed immediately.
- Complete the plan for the cycle count – It’s an unfortunate fact that the inventory shrinkage is sometimes a result of personnel theft.
- Random cycle counting – You can randomly pick a number of items to be counted at each cycle count when your warehouse has a large number of like items. This eliminates the breakdown of any group at once, so that you can count during business hours.
- ABC cycle counting – As mentioned above, ABC cycle counting is used to classify items into categories A, B or C, based on the ABC inventory management technique and the Pareto principle. A object is more often counted than B and C objects by this approach.
What’s the inventory kitting?
The method of grouping, packaging and selling widely divided products is an inventory kitting, often killed as ‘product bundling.’ Usually, the inventory system adds each individual item to the sale automatically when you buy a kitted item.
Sets packed
Packaged sets promote consumer buying through the availability of pre-set product amounts, colors and mixtures. They are also used as gift packages, which make shopping for presents convenient for consumers without the need to plan a package themselves. This means enhanced customer service and higher company order value.
Boxes to subscribe
The market now has a large range of subscription boxes – from beauty and clothes to coffee and food. Like boxed sets, subscription boxes allow the selling of many items in one purchase, which increases order prices and generates customers repeatedly. Customers that have little time to handle ongoing products orders also have this convenience service.
Items preassembled
There is only one reason IKEA furnishings get a bad rap: they have to be installed in the house. Product assembly is a kind of inventory package and when you assemble products on behalf of consumers, you basically sell individual inventories together. Also kitting is used in the production and wholesale operations to monitor inventory parts and reorder. In a retail environment, too, product assembly gives consumers more options and helps them to provide better service.
Customized and customized products
Custom-made products can be considered as kitting by using separately tracked materials to create a product that is ready to be sold from an inventory management perspective. For example, if a custom lace collar is applied to a single shirt, it is known as a kit if both the neck and the shirt are stocks in your inventory management system.
