Inventory in the bottled water business includes empty and filled water bottles, bottle caps, and labeling and packing material. ERP for bottled water inventory management is an integrated system that automates and streamlines your entire business operations, including inventory management.
With the increasing demand for clean and healthy drinking water, bottled water has become paramount, making efficiency a major aspect of bottled water businesses.
However, with changing weather-driven seasonal demands to reduce the volume and storage requirements, businesses face difficulty managing their inventory. This blog will explore the potential challenges of bottled water inventory management.
Inaccurate data and tracking
Manual inventory management involves counting stocks, keeping paper records, and purchasing stocks on call or one-on-one. Relying on manual processes or legacy systems can lead to data discrepancies between the recorded and actual inventory counts. This includes counting errors, data entry mistakes, and a lack of real-time inventory updates. Inaccurate data results in wrong decisions, leading to stockouts and overstocking.
It makes it challenging to trace products, manage recalls, and understand true inventory levels in multiple warehouses. The high number of bottled water units makes manual tracking prone to errors. Lost and damaged water bottles further increase the complexities. Water Delivery Solutions offers an end-to-end enterprise resource planning system that integrates all business operations with data flow automation, ensuring inventory accuracy.
Overstocking or understocking
This refers to having too much or too little inventory in the warehouse concerning the demand, leading to inefficiencies and financial losses. Overstocking water bottles can hold your capital, increase storage costs, elevate the risk of damage or obsolescence (water doesn’t expire; however, the plastic bottles degrade), and waste storage. Understockingcan lead to lost sales, customer dissatisfaction, potential brand reputation damage, and increased replenishment costs for faster shipping.
The demand for bottled water fluctuates significantly due to seasonal changes, weather conditions, and local events, making demand forecasting critical to avoid these imbalances. ERP provides real-time stock updates and automated replenishment, enabling you to monitor stock levels and ensure optimal stock. You can define an inventory threshold to automate replenishment so that you never go out of stock and end up overselling.
Limited inventory visibility
Lacking real-time inventory insights, location, and movement across the water delivery supply chain makes it difficult to know accurate stock availability. It hinders effective inventory planning, delays order fulfillment, complicates adjusting to demands, and makes optimizing inventory distribution across multiple warehouses or sales channels challenging.
Without end-to-end inventory visibility, locating where and how much stock is available throughout a supply chain is challenging. This can lead to stockouts and overstocking, inaccurate forecasting, delayed order fulfillment, and lost sales.
Inefficient warehouse process
Ineffective warehouse layouts, manual picking and packing, lack of automation, and poor organization within the warehouse result in wasted time, increased labor costs, and higher error rates. This can slow down order fulfillment, reduce overall business efficiency, and increase the risk of product damage.
Bulk and heavy water bottles need efficient handling and storage solutions. Inefficient processes can lead to supply chain bottlenecks and strain your warehouse staff. The ERP for bottled water inventory management can help you integrate IoT devices such as barcode scanners or RFID to track the movement of water bottles within a single or multiple warehouses.
Unreliable demand planning
Relying on outdated forecasting methods, a lack of data analysis, and an inability to account for influencing factors can lead to inaccurate demand calculations. It can lead to overstocking and understocking, impacting profits and customer satisfaction. Bottled water demand is particularly impacted by external factors, making accurate demand planning a significant hurdle.
Managing returns and obsolescence
It is challenging to keep track of the number of filled and empty bottles available in the warehouse and with customers in real time. Even though the water doesn’t expire, the plastic bottle can degrade with time, impacting the water. Handling and managing empty bottle returns from customers manually is prone to errors and can result in the loss of bottles and financial losses. Water Delivery Solutions provides predictive analysis functionality. It analyses historical data to identify patterns and trends for accurate demand forecasts.
Managing long-tail spend
This refers to managing the costs associated with low-value large purchases related to inventory management, including maintenance supplies and packaging material. Though the purchases might seem small, they can collectively become high, leading to budget overruns and reduced profitability. It includes managing the procurement of various bottle types, caps, labels, and bottling and packaging machinery maintenance.You can manage all your expenses on the ERP for bottled water services. The system enables you to track, monitor, and control business expenses.
Inventory loss
As told earlier, the water doesn’t spoil; however, degradation of the bottle over time can impact the water quality. This requires you to recall water bottles due to quality issues, leading to financial losses. Collecting and managing empty bottles manually is prone to errors, resulting in misplaced bottles and financial losses. The ERP software provides real-time visibility into inventory, enabling you to maintain inventory levels.
Conclusion
These are some common challenges that bottled water businesses face without an adequate system to automate and streamline inventory management operations. Water Delivery Solutions offers an ERP for bottled water businesses that can optimize inventory operations, ensuring optimal stock levels and timely order fulfillment. Are you curious to know more about ERP? Schedule a free demo with our team to see how it works and help your business.
He loves to explore. His passion for helping delivery industries in all aspects flows through in the vision he has. In addition to providing smart solution to make delivery process flawless, Ravi also likes to write sometimes to make it easier for people from business industry looking for digital solutions.
