Part X — Do You Know Where Your Vendors Are?
And finally concluding our 10-part series of “10 Ways Inventory Management Can Make or Break You” we’d like to close with:
#10: Do You Know Where Your Vendors Are?
Who are your vendors? How many vendors have you purchased your inventory items from? Are they late delivering orders? If so how often? Do quoted prices differ from prices listed on an invoice? These are all questions you may have about your vendors. Based on your business and business needs—delivery timeliness, availability of items and service—may vary in importance. For example, you may be more interested in timely and quick supply of items, or you may want the cheapest price and you can handle late shipments or poor service, or you may be somewhere in the middle, or you may have some items you need shipped on time and others that you don’t.
Managing your vendors and tracking what they provide and how they meet your needs is critical to your business. In many industries cultivating good relationships with vendors often provides a competitive advantage that can make your business excel. With a good integrated system you can collect and gather the information you need to make good decisions about your vendors. In addition, with a complete, integrated, Inventory Management system you can also provide your Vendors information to help them better serve you.
The Cougar Mountain Software Solution
The bottom line—proper management of your business’ inventory starts and ends with a customizable, robust, fully-integrated software setup that outputs reports outlining the information you need to see on a daily basis.
For over 25 years Cougar Mountain Software has designed and produced solutions to help small- and medium-sized businesses better manage their inventory and improve their bottom line. Unlike software that merely interfaces, our programs are truly integrated and a change made in one aspect of the system (a sold item for example) is automatically reflected in every other facet of the system. You never have to enter the same information twice and always know your business’ numbers are up-to-the-second and accurate.
Not only do we have a myriad of tools and features that comes with each of our packages, it’s the amount of information available in our reports—and the fact that they are customizable—that has been the subject of praise from our customers since the beginning. We provide multiple report options from within the Inventory, Sales, and Purchase Order modules—and since Cougar Mountain Software is tightly integrated, business owners and managers can track details about the movement of Inventory from receiving to the sale. Two other reports, the Monthly Movement report and Snapshot report are just two more we recently created for the release of our most updated software, CMS Professional Version 12.
The Monthly Movement Report in the Inventory module provides detailed information about the movement of your Inventory items over a 12-month period. With this you can track movement in detail and identify trends in your sales, then adjust your strategy and purchasing based on this information.
We also added a Snapshot Report in each module. Where, for example, in Inventory the Snapshot report shows outlines information such as the top 10 best and top 10 worse selling items, along with other information that helps highlight big movers and identify any dramatic changes in sales. This report helps you make good business decisions that take advantage of opportunities or avoid pitfalls as patterns change.
Cougar Mountain is dedicated to helping small- and medium-sized businesses improve their bottom line by better managing inventory. If you would like more information about any of Cougar Mountain’s products, reports or features, please don’t hesitate to visit our website at www.cougarmtn.com or call (800) 388-3038.
Read “10 Ways Inventory Management Can Make or Break You” in its entirety.
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