During May 2017, Inc.com published “60 Percent of Companies Fail in 6 Months Because of This (It’s Not What You Think).” That article is based on research from the National Cyber Security Alliance. The Alliance found almost 50 percent of small businesses have experienced a cyber attack. More alarming, as many as 60 percent of those businesses close their doors within six months of being attacked.
The media has reported that cybercriminals successfully attack even the world’s largest businesses. Those attacks are increasing, as well as their sophistication and ease of use. There are even criminals selling “malware-as-a-service” packages and priced based on the number of systems to be targeted and compromised. The continuing evolution and escalation of cybersecurity threats put increasing pressure on IT asset and cybersecurity managers at businesses of every size and type.
Inventory Management and “Big Data”
The larger and more complex your inventory, the larger the range and number of items you must track; therefore, your IT-powered tracking technologies of choice are generating a huge amount of data. To leverage that data, you need IT-powered tools for ITAM and for data analysis.
Depending on your business needs and IT sophistication, the use of a simple spreadsheet application or dedicated data-analysis software can analyze that data; however, it must first be collected, secured, verified, rationalized and stored. Also, to transform that data into actionable information will require flexible reporting features. You may already have tools with those features for ITAM or other IT management tasks. Using incumbent tools to report inventory-management data is a strong incentive for connecting your inventory-management solutions with those tools via IT.
Inventory Management: Challenges to Your Success
During October 2018, SearchERP.Techtarget.com Executive Editor David Essex asked “a handful of analysts, vendors, and users” for their thoughts on the top challenges facing inventory managers. The respondents “coalesced around five themes, all of which relate to putting quality information in the hands of the most knowledgeable people at the right time.” Those themes are presented here in the words and the order in which they appeared in the original article.
“Integrating demand planning and inventory planning”
Different people, processes, and tools often manage these equally critical, interdependent functions. Effective inventory management requires the systems and information each uses to be interconnected to obtain a complete view of the current reality and to forecast more accurately. Integrating these systems and data and other related applications and functions, however, can be difficult, protracted and expensive.
“Training users of demand planning and inventory management software”
The best demand planning or inventory-management software in the world will never deliver complete business value until those assigned to use it become adept and comfortable with it. These are complex disciplines, and the software used for them often reflects that complexity. It can, therefore, be difficult and expensive both to find trained, experienced users and “grow” them internally.
“Dumping those old spreadsheets and paper”
Old habits and comfortable practices die hard, even in the face of newer, better alternatives, especially for some inventory managers and users (and many avoiders) of almost every modern technology. Resistance to modernized processes or tools can take many forms; however, all of them can contribute to inconsistent, inadequate inventory management if not recognized and resolved.
“Standardizing data”
Your business and its inventory-management initiative are vulnerable to the hoary and oft-repeated admonishment, “garbage in, garbage out.” With inventory management, multiple versions and definitions of the same data can result in inaccurate, incomplete or outdated views of inventories and supply chains. These can lead directly to sub-optimal business decisions that can hurt sales, revenues, customer satisfaction and the perception of your business.
“Choosing software that suits your business”
Every business that sells goods of any kind needs some version of inventory management; however, the specific needs of your business are unique to it. Those needs must define and prioritize the specific inventory-management solutions you choose and deploy. Where are the goods you sell located? Where are your customers? How do you deliver your goods to them? Are most of your sales large or small transactions? These and other factors directly affect what tools you need and their relative importance to your business.