Inventory Visibility: The Key to Efficient 3PL Warehousing Operations

Running a successful business comes with an endless checklist of tasks. Even if you’re working with a third-party logistics company that shoulders part of the responsibility, it’s important to manage your shipments and inventory efficiently.

These responsibilities include building an effective supply chain and keeping track of inventory across warehouses and fulfillment facilities. However, without the right system in place, this can start to seem like a tall order. This is why inventory visibility has become a major factor in the success of any retail operation.

Inventory visibility can have many benefits. It involves tracking and viewing inventory in real time across warehouses or fulfillment centers. Through this function, it’s possible to gain live insights into the number of units stocked at every warehouse, as well as their precise locations.

By methodically tracking inventory across your supply chain network, you can streamline your warehousing operations and take your business to new heights.

What makes inventory visibility a crucial aspect of 3PL warehousing services is that it enables you to meet your customers’ expectations and make important decisions concerning supply and distribution. In fact, low inventory visibility lays the foundation for other concerns and could even negatively impact the success of your supply chain network.

Often, stocks at certain warehouses may abruptly start to run low, leading to a build up of avoidable costs and pressure due to last minute restocks. These dwindling stocks could then result in unfulfilled or delayed orders which casts a shadow on customer experience.

Simply put, full inventory visibility is an important aspect of inventory management in 3PL warehousing that lets you organize supply and prepare wisely for the unexpected.

Inventory visibility can be immensely beneficial for your business. Here are a few key ways you can make the most of inventory visibility in 3PL warehouse logistics.

Inventory visibility lets you know exactly where each unit of an item is at a given moment and how many are in stock at which warehouse. Access to this live data enables businesses to make an informed decision about the allocation of stocks across the supply network. This real time data can also help you maintain healthy inventory levels across warehouses, avoiding sudden dips in stocks and an unsavory domino effect.

With complete supervision of your inventory, you gain the ability to refine existing processes and improve the efficiency of the supply chain. Rather than dedicating labor and money towards time-consuming tasks, such as manual audits of inventory, these resources can be redirected towards other necessary tasks.

This is a gamechanger for businesses that operate with an intricate supply network involving multiple warehouses and distribution points. So, instead of repeated manual audits which come with a margin of error, inventory visibility systems can help account for each unit of your products.

Aside from viewing and tracking stocks in real time, full inventory visibility can also mean major savings for your business. By using historical data and inventory stats, you can strategically distribute inventory across your supply chain to reduce transit times and shipping costs.

Additionally, inventory visibility helps you avoid incurring storage costs from poor planning or the accumulation of dead stock. If you have a bird’s eye view of inventory across warehouses, you can also avoid stocking too much inventory at warehouses in relatively dry delivery zones.

These saved costs leave you free to explore other avenues, such as promotional services that might enhance the customer experience, like free shipping.

Inventory visibility helps to avoid poor customer experiences by averting unwanted delays or order cancellations due to low stocks in warehouses. Additionally, opting for full inventory visibility may also work to enhance the overall customer experience.

With real time tracking of shipments, it becomes easier to offer concrete updates to expectant customers. Knowing which warehouses specific shipments are linked to also makes it simpler to provide real solutions and redress problems that might occur with orders. Additionally, last-mile delivery costs can be significantly reduced by storing sufficient stocks at locations closer to customers.

Increasing inventory visibility in supply chain logistics allows you to gather plenty of data over time regarding various aspects of the supply process. This data concerns dates and times of orders, different location zones of deliveries, and frequently ordered products.

These parameters are important in the process of determining inventory demand across warehouses. So, inventory visibility can help create the opportunity for more accurate demand forecasting.

These are just a few benefits of inventory visibility that can streamline your warehousing operations and unlock efficiency. In the long run, full inventory visibility is the key to running a seamless supply chain and can even help you make better business decisions.