Mastering Inventory Basics in 90 Seconds: Essential Tips for Success (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi, I'm James. This is Whiteboard Wednesday. My boss gave me 90 seconds to explain all this or I lose my job. Great. Inventory basics. Obviously, you're going to be getting stuff from some vendor or supplier. It's your business. You're putting it on your shelf and either redistributing or producing a new product or a little bit of both. What do we do about our location? We can either have it on-site and on-hand. We can have it off-site. We're starting small or there's even the option of drop ship or a little bit of all. Identify. This is really important with our inventory. We need to make sure we're using stock keeping unit, known as a SKU. Making sure we ID label everywhere that we can so we know exactly what we have, where we have it. It's going to take a little more time in the beginning but then you're not looking and searching. You know where stuff belongs, whether you're taking it down or putting it back up. Units of measure. Are you dealing in pounds? Are you dealing in the metric system? Are you dealing with ounces? Know what you're counting. Also, know are you counting by tens? Are you counting by the box, the individual part? Something that small can really mess you up. Know what your system is. Plan. What kind of plan do you have in place as to how you are using your inventory management? Are you trying to push each item through and hit an allotted certain number every quarter, production week, whatever it is? Or are you pulling it through? Relative to every order you receive, that's when you make your product. This requires a little bit more input from your computer. In fact, a lot more. Let's get to that. Records. Are you doing it on paper? Sure, it's easy to start with. It's very cheap but then you have to keep track of all of that. All those files. All that information. And if you plan on growing, that's going to be a nightmare when you have to make the transition to the computer. But you can have everything on hand. All your files in one place. And if you make use of the cloud, boom, you've got backup storage and you don't have to worry about losing files even if something happens to your business computer. So inventory basics. These are simple things but if you're not making use of them or even planning for them, well, you're planning to fail or something like that. I don't know. I only had 90 seconds. I hope I don't run out of time. I hope I don't run out of time. I hope I don't run out of time.