How To Have A Successful Stocktake For Your Retail Business
Time-consuming and laborious, a stocktake is the one task many retail businesses dread. Most stocktakes take many hours to complete, causing fatigue in workers and overtime costs for business owners. Many stock takes also result in inaccurate or unsatisfactory results, costing even more resources to rectify.
Let’s discover how stocktakes can be made less tedious with RFID technology. With the best practices for a successful RFID implementation in mind, a stock take can be fast, efficient, and accurate.
Tag inventory and invest in RFID readers
By tagging your items in-store and in the warehouse with RFID tags, you can also match records much more easily than sifting through invoices and order chits. In the case of a stocktake with discrepancies, reconciliations can be made quickly and correctly.
A definite worthwhile investment that pays off long term, introducing RFID infrastructure and technology to your business also enables you to monitor inventory in real time. This means quicker discovery of discrepancies, allowing you to take swift action and make amends.
The handheld readers used in RFID technology are also mobile and carry many customisation options, allowing you to update, edit or report discrepancies between in-store inventory levels and that of the inventory management system.
Simultaneous scanning of merchandise
Many businesses count individual stock by either scanning individual barcodes or physically writing down SKUs for further compilation. These traditional methods often lead to human error, further exacerbated by the fact that stock takes are often performed after a shift or intermittently during lull periods.
RFID technology enables multiple items to be scanned at the same time with the accuracy of a computer, allowing you to both save time and achieve ever more accurate results during a stock take.
Post-stocktake data analysis
Data collected from a stocktake can also be processed much easier due to the ability to update inventory management platforms in real time. In doing so, you allow the monitoring of more updated and current inventory levels, allowing you to replenish or phase out stock accordingly.
Unique IDs tagged to RFID tags can also carry product data, such as expiration dates. This is important in allowing you to quickly identify a stock that no longer belongs on the shelves, enabling you to keep shelves stocked appropriately.
By enabling prompt updates to the inventory management system without as much need for manual input, your inventory management process becomes much more accurate, streamlined and efficient.
Conclusion
A stocktake is a significant investment in time and manpower. As many existing stocktake methods are prone to human error due to their manual nature, RFID technology and asset tracking systems can help enable a successful stocktake that minimises inventory discrepancies and better reconciles mismatches in data.
As well as being more accurate than manual methods, RFID technology can speed up the stocktake process as an added bonus. This is due to the ability to scan multiple items and update systems in real-time simultaneously.
For those looking to invest in an RFID system for their business, e-Tag RFID offers RFID system solutions for those looking to revamp the way they process stock. With over 11 years of experience and a strong team of passionate experts, e-Tag RFID ensures the very best when implementing RFID technology to streamline processes and increase efficiency.
