The Benefits of Barcode Technology for Inventory Management

Companies are faced with increasingly complex inventory management systems due to rapidly growing businesses, new customer demands, greater market opportunities, and a trend toward availability of more diverse products. With this complexity, trying to stay on track with where products are located and how much is on hand has become a significant challenge. This is especially difficult for companies that are still trying to get by with some manual processes.

Enter barcode technology – a system that includes a database, scanner, labels and printers – which is proving that it can revolutionize the inventory management process, helping to address the complexity through automation and reduce the confusion and inaccuracy that manual processes have caused. Here are the benefits of barcode technology:

Increased Speed

Automation has always been known to speed up any process because it removes many steps that were previously used in a manual system. Every step within a process incrementally adds that much more time before it can be considered complete. The more steps that can be removed, the faster it can be finished. This applies to the process of orders that have many steps and people involved. With barcode technology, information can be quickly added to a database, analyzed, and processed that no human could ever achieve. It only takes a matter of minutes, which dramatically increases the inventory process, allowing you to take on more business and satisfy customer expectations.

Greater Security

To ensure no one can steal products or items from the inventory, a barcode system provides a much higher level of security to reduce shortage issues. The barcode on each item in the inventory provides a way to track everything and know where it is at all times. This reduces the risk that employees will take merchandise from the warehouse, which means that unnecessary costs are not eating away at profitability. At the same time, employees are held more accountable for their action.

Fewer Mistakes

Barcodes much of the human process from inventory management by taking over what employees might have handled. No matter how good your staff is, the fact is that there are still bound to be errors. Barcoding technology processes information about the inventory for employees so there are fewer mistakes. Scanning barcodes also means that numbers are not transposed like might happen when doing these processes manually.

Effective Decision Making

Barcoding works like an analytics tool and offers a wealth of data on inventory use and ordering preferences. This data helps to then identify spikes in demand or changing purchase trends that provide a way to make better decisions about what to keep on hand in the warehouse or how to restructure the warehouse’s layout for more efficient processing and picking. Better decision making can also be applied to tracking and collating costs, inventory inefficiencies, and labor costs.

Labor Reduction

Companies can save money by automating the inventory management process because they will need fewer hours to get the work done and even fewer employees. That’s because the barcoding eliminates manual data entry and increases parts checkout, reordering, and recordkeeping.

Real-Time Information

Barcoding automatically updates the information in the system so there will always be a real-time count on quantities. This updated information is also available across all devices within the warehouse so everyone has the latest data to use for their tasks.

Growing Preference for Barcode Technology

As more types of businesses that keep an inventory recognize the benefits of barcoding technology, its use grows and replaces all the manual processes. Even small companies on limited budgets realize that barcoding technology is an affordable investment that offers a return in as little as the first year of using the equipment and processes and adds liquidity to your operations.