Month: April 2023

Companies have always relied on shipping to bookend the success of their business, but the uncertainty of pandemics and supply chain issues have put the importance of shipping front and center. What good is a product sold if it never reaches its destination?

Let’s cover how to find your shipping habits, improve our shipping relationships, and be profit minded in our shipping process

Find Your Shipping Habits

What types of habits can you identify in your business? Do you ship everyday, or have have heavier outbounds during certain days or times of the week? How do holiday impact your shipping volume? 

Understanding your ordering needs and your customers’ ordering habits will help you pick the right carriers, price and speed dependant, while having alternatives on standby–don’t wait until the busy season to find yours!

Use Technology

To assist in your habit identification, make technology your friend. Companies like Shippo, Starship, and others offer advanced tools to help you with your shipping, costs, and carrier library. The shipping industry at large has expanded with more options and carriers to choose from, meaning it’s more important than ever to integrate these tools as much as possible.

Along with shipping solutions, incorporate a Warehouse Solution to reduce the time spend picking your orders and get more shipped in less time.

Now What?

Have you narrowed down your habits? Good, it’s time to adjust. Shipping is not a set-and-forget aspect of business, but benefits from paying attention to market changes and monitoring ecommonic indicators that can serve as a forecast of change to come. Given the global market we all work within, even fluctuations in gas prices can have a longterm impact on your own costs.

Improve Shipping Relationships

Even the word “shipping” often implies the big names and colors, be it purple and orange, brown, blue, or yellow, but sometimes we need to think smaller. By incorporating both national and regional carriers, your business can cover the entire states, but also have cost effective options for the deliveries that are “down the street”.

Arming yourself with more shipping options also opens up a better relationship to tackle surges in supply, demand, and the wheels required to carry both. Talk with national, secondary, and tertiary carriers to understand volume discounts, shipping contracts, and expected volume to preventatively address possible demand surges. This requires more work up front, but provides long-term health for your business. You can’t deliver a great customer experience if you cannot deliver their order.

Similar to keeping track of market changes that affect your business, pay attention to markets that your own goods come from, nationally or globally. An impact in metal production in Canada could affect your fabrication business, and your metal sheet stock level may need to be temporary adjusted to prevent your own shortages.

In addition to tracking markets, pay attention to foreign market requirements that affect customs, taxes, or tariffs. Across the pond, changes in EU regulations can affect the required taxes prior to item releases, which can wreck havoc on revenue if not accounted for. If your business intends to buy an sell internationally, reach out to your shipping providers for their international representative to get answers specific to your business.

Use Technology

The right software can provide insight into your your shipping, and provide actionable measurements, allowing you to address concerns with carriers and ensure you’re getting what you paid for. It will also allow for an easier and more accurate return process, which is becoming increasingly more valuable for customers, especially end users.

Now What?

You’ve built carrier relationships, now continue to negotiate shipping terms to balance costs with customers’ needs in mind. Proactively communicate with sales reps at your carriers to get ahead of capacity issues, upcoming international changes,and then ensure your own production is scaleable to delivery. 

Profit Minded Shipping

We talk about ecommerce alot, and we need to keep driving the point home; online sales are expected to reach over $5.9 trillion by year’s end, and B2B businesses need to catch a vision of its role in their revenue, and include it within their shipping strategy.

Start by choosing the right ecommerce platform(s) that integrate seamlessly with your shipping providers. This allows for automatic tracking and real-time updates on the status of the package, which is crucial for providing a positive customer experience.

Offering free shipping often incentivize customers to make purchases, but this cost can be offset by incorporating it into the price of the product. Other shipping options, like faster delivery times or volume discounts, can also incentivize a purchase, but be mindful of transparency in your options so customers can have real expectations of costs and delivery times. Remember, shipping is as much about your customer as it is your business’ success. 

Use Technology

Ecommerce means electronic solutions, like using an electronic (web) portal for B2B Sales, where customers can order any time of the day, while the system also provides the required item accounting, pricing rules, and user access to keep the business backend running smoothly.

For businesses that frequently sell to large chain stores or deal with EDI requirements, connecting your inventory systems into an EDI provider will save the time involved and create a faster shipment turnaround time.

Now What?

You’ve incorporated more eCommerce channels and connected your systems to your inventory? Great, see if you can repeat that process for another sales avenue. Your business is not limited to one ECommerce channel, or one type of selling process. As you add another channel or “cart”, incorporate a Multi-Cart to pull incoming sales orders and inventory data into one central hub. More time saved, more money made.

Takeway

A successful shipping strategy is crucial to any business, and it requires understanding your shipping habits, building strong relationships with carriers, using technology to streamline the process, and being profit-minded. By doing so, businesses can provide a positive customer experience, balance costs with customers’ needs in mind, and catch a vision of the role of online sales in revenue.

If your business can use a hand in being more profit-minded in its inventory management, or wants to know how to add eCommerce value, get started here←.

eCommerce is not the unknown sales channel it once was for B2B businesses, but there are still a lot of companies that either don’t appreciate the revenue potential a digital sales channel can provide, or don’t know how to get started.

Let’s cover the benefits of eCommerce for B2B, general marketing practices, explore a variety of strategies that could benefit your B2B business right now, and finally cover several overlooked advantages of using eCommerce for your B2B.

Benefits of eCommerce for B2B

Increased Revenue Potential + Valuable Data

B2B eCommerce enables businesses to reach a wider audience and sell products 24/7, resulting in increased sales, while also providing opportunity for upselling and cross-selling. 

Opening a wider sales channel provides more data to understand customer behavior and tailor offerings to their needs and preferences. 

Improved Customer Experience

A user-friendly website, mobile compatibility, and a streamlined checkout process greatly enhances the customer experience. Further improvements should offer personalized experiences, such as customized pricing and catalogs, to build customer loyalty. The digital word of mouth experience travels further and faster than ever, so put it to work for your business.

Reduced Costs 

B2B eCommerce can reduce and offset costs associated with traditional sales channels, such as sales personnel, brick-and-mortar locations, and marketing materials, and with the right cart  integrations, a B2B company can manage all shopping platforms into a central hub, and still keep accurate inventory counts.

Expanded Reach 

A digital presence for any business expands your reach beyond the local market and out to  customers worldwide. This can be particularly beneficial for small businesses or businesses in niche industries that may have a limited local customer base.

Marketing Practices for B2B eCommerce:

Value Propositions

A clear value proposition is how businesses differentiate themselves from competitors and attract customers, often focusing on unique products or services, exceptional customer service, or providing hard to ignore pricing. Include this in your eCommerce efforts.

Content Marketing Strategy

Developing a clear marketing strategy is not an overnight endeavor, but will serve to establish your business as thought leaders in their industry and build brand awareness. These efforts typically include creating blog posts, whitepapers, or videos that provide valuable information to customers, while also driving prospects to your site.

Social Media Engagement

Don’t let social media be “just for kids”, these platforms allow businesses to find their customers where they already “live”. Social media helps businesses engage with customers and build relationships, while providing additional spaces to promote products or services and drive traffic to the website.

SEO Optimization

Optimizing for SEO can improve search engine rankings and drive more traffic to the website. This can include keyword research, optimizing website content, and building backlinks. Again, the goal with most efforts is to bring attention to your business and offerings.

Customer Feedback

We’ve touched on customers as it relates to their experience, but implementing customer feedback identifies areas for business improvement and enhances the customer experience. This can be as simple as collecting feedback through surveys or reviews and using that feedback to make changes to the website or products.

Integration with Other Systems

Integration with other systems such as ERP and CRM can enable seamless operations and improve efficiency. This can include automating processes such as inventory management, order fulfillment, and customer service.

Strategies for Success in B2B eCommerce:

Make it User-Friendly

A customer’s ease-of-use for our business sites has shown to have multiple benefits, like enhanced customer experience, increased sales, and even better organic search rankings. The less friction for a customer in their journey to a purchase, the more often those purchases will occur.

Mobile Compatibility

Everyone is on their phones, and the majority of web traffic now finds their needs through their device. B2B Businesses should ensure that their website is optimized for mobile devices and that the checkout or quoting process is easy to complete on a mobile device.

Inventory Management

Effective inventory management is crucial for ensuring products are in stock and reducing fulfillment errors. Businesses should use inventory management software to track inventory levels and automate reordering processes.

Pricing and Discount Structures

Implementing customer-specific pricing and discount structures can enhance the customer experience and build loyalty. This can include offering volume discounts or pricing based on customer order history.

Bulk Ordering 

Speaking of discounts… bulk ordering capabilities can streamline the purchasing process for customers and reduce costs for your business. This method includes offering bulk ordering discounts or providing tools for customers to easily reorder frequently purchased items.

Data Analysis 

Your data is vital in understanding customer behavior and optimizing business operations. Your businesses should collect and analyze to generate reports on customer preferences, purchase history, and website traffic to identify trends and make data-driven decisions. This can also help businesses tailor their marketing efforts and improve the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Overlooked Benefits of B2B eCommerce

Data Analysis

This item is so important that it bears repeating: Data analysis is crucial for understanding customer behavior and optimizing business operations. Businesses should collect and analyze data on customer preferences, purchase history, and website traffic to identify trends and make data-driven decisions. Let your data guide your marketing efforts and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Multi-Channel Selling

Multiple channels means multiple forms of revenue that live at the edge of typical eCommerce considerations, such as partner programs, vendor portals, online marketplaces, even hunting route sales with a goal to convert them to online sales. 

Integration with Shipping Carriers

When you team up with shipping providers, you can streamline the fulfillment process and reduce shipping costs. This can include automatically generating shipping labels and tracking information, as well as providing customers with real-time shipping updates.

Order Management

Effective order management is crucial for ensuring orders are fulfilled accurately and on time. B2B Businesses need order management software to track orders and manage inventory levels, as well as automate fulfillment and shipping processes to ensure they remain competitive.

Faster Strategy Turnaround

When a B2B Business establishes their eCommerce presence and process, marketing changes and trends are easier to meet and adopt, from adding landing pages to adjusting brand positioning.

Partnerships and Collaborations

By building out your network you can enable your business to expand offerings and reach new customers. This often includes partnering with complementary businesses or industry associations to offer bundled products or solutions.

Continuous Improvement

B2B eCommerce is constantly evolving, and businesses must stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies to remain competitive. This can include adopting new technologies, improving the customer experience, and continuously refining business operations.

Takeaway

B2B eCommerce can provide so many benefits that finding the right solutions for your specific industry and business can feel almost overwhelming, but the nearly endless benefits greatly outweigh the drawbacks. 

Review how ECommerce solutions can benefit your B2B business, and when you’re ready to find a solution that fits your business, get started here!

 

As a business owner or operations manager, you know that every penny counts, and smart investments pay out in dividends. But in your warehouse, how can your money be put to the best use?

Let’s cover some inventory management basics, the benefits, and how to assess your own business’ needs to take action that makes sense for your business.

The Basics of Inventory Management

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Determine Optimal Inventory Levels

The first step in effective inventory management is determining the optimal inventory levels for your specific business. Often, this involves analyzing your sales data, identifying your most popular products, and forecasting future demand. 

By knowing how much inventory you need to have on hand at any given time, you can avoid stockouts and excess inventory, while also avoiding the costs of excessive inventory.

Implementing an inventory Tracking System

To manage your inventory effectively, you need the benefits of an inventory system in place for tracking your counts and maintaining accurate information across everything that comes in and out of your business.

Proper software can also include, mobile warehouse solutions, barcode scanners, or other tools to keep track of your inventory in real-time. By having accurate and up-to-date information about your inventory, you can make informed decisions about purchasing, production, and distribution.

Optimizing Your Warehouse Layout

The way that you store and handle your inventory has a big impact on your business efficiency. By optimizing your warehouse layout, you can reduce the time and effort required to move and track your inventory. 

Steps to organize in a logical manner should include using labels and signage to make it easy to find what you need, ensuring that your inventory is stored safely and securely, and creating dedicated areas for common work processes.

Managing Your inventory Turnover Rate

The rate at which your inventory is sold and replaced is known as your inventory turnover rate, and is an important metric to track, as it can help you identify slow-moving inventory and adjust your purchasing and production accordingly. 

By managing your inventory turnover rate, you can avoid excess inventory and reduce the risk of obsolescence.

The Benefits of Inventory Management Training

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Increased productivity and efficiency

Proper inventory management can help you streamline your business operations, increase productivity, and create a common knowledge base across your workforce. By knowing what you have in stock, where it is located, and how much you need to reorder, you can avoid stockouts, reduce lead times, and optimize your warehouse layout. 

With inventory management training, you and your staff can learn best practices for managing inventory and develop the skills to improve your business efficiency.

Improved Supply Chain Management

By having a better understanding of your inventory, you can make informed decisions about purchasing, production, and distribution, providing a “big picture” of the business. This can lead to improved collaboration with suppliers, reduced transportation costs, and better customer service. 

Inventory management training will provide the tools and protocols to  teach you how to optimize your supply chain and improve your business performance.

Better Customer Service

Customers expect businesses to have the products they need when they need them, and by having a well-managed inventory system, you can meet customer demand as they arise. This elevated response can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

With inventory management training, you can learn how to provide better customer service by improving your inventory control.

Reduced Costs and Waste

As previously mentioned, poor handling of  inventory can lead to excess inventory, stockouts, and waste. These issues can result in increased storage and handling costs, lost sales, and decreased profitability. 

By investing in inventory management training, you can learn how to optimize your inventory control, reduce waste, and save wasteful spending.

Steps for Implementing Inventory Management Training

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Assessing Inventory Management Needs

Before implementing an inventory management training program, it’s important to assess your business’s inventory management needs by  analyzing your current inventory control processes, how your employees perform their inventory related tasks, and definitely seek feedback from those who are “in the trenches. By identifying these areas of improvement, you can form the basis of what training is needed.

Identifying Training Options

Once you have assessed your inventory management needs, you can begin to identify training options that are available and most useful for your business. This can include online courses, workshops, seminars, and consulting services, but we recommend finding a provider that has extensive knowledge with your inventory solution provider with the relevant years of experience to provide the program that will benefit your employees (and you).

Developing an inventory management training program

Once you’ve identified a training provider that will suit your needs, set an expectation of what you want to accomplish, what the current shortcomings of the business are, and how you would like to change. The more details you provide, the more insight your provider can gain, and the sooner your expectations can be aligned.

Depending on your needs and requirements, your training may be extensive or minimal, which is why formulating a plan with your provider matters, so don’t skip it!

Implementing and monitoring the program

Once your training program has been agreed on, it’s time to implement it. This can involve scheduling training sessions, ensuring that all staff attend the training, and providing ongoing support and coaching to help employees apply what they have learned.

It’s also important to monitor the success of the training program and make adjustments as needed, while also planning for additional training to help maintain and even elevate your inventory process.

Takeaway

Effective inventory management is critical for any business that deals with physical goods, and. poor inventory control can lead to excess inventory, stockouts, and waste, leading to lost sales and decreased profitability.

By investing in inventory management training, businesses can improve their productivity, supply chain management, customer service, and cost efficiency. With the steps we’ve outlined above, your business can develop and implement an inventory management training program that will help your business and workforce thrive. Don’t wait until it’s too late – invest in inventory management training today!

If you have questions about your inventory management, get started right here!

If your business deals with inventory in some form, you may have encountered conversations that sound like this:

“We forgot to order more of [important product] and now we’re all out.”

“Hey, [Potential Customer] asked if we have [product] on hand, but I told them I didn’t know…”

“No one knew for sure if the [material] was expired, we didn’t think it was, so we used it.”

“There’s some guys in suits at the front desk asking for you, what’s an audit?

Every business has mistakes, setbacks, and failures that serve as “learning opportunities”, but how can your business cut back on costly mistakes when it comes to inventory and its management? 

Let’s take an unconventional approach to how you manage your inventory base business, and imagine the least effective, most costly methods, and work backward from there.

Don’t Count Anything, Ever

No one actually likes counting inventory. No one likes tracking what’s coming in, going out, or being assembled. All of that time counting could be spent on actual work. Although, we do like to count the dollar signs from the latest sales order, as long as we don’t misplace them…

OR you could… Count Everything

Count what you have on hand. Count how many products can be produced from your current stock. Count when items are scrapped, sold, or repurposed. Every number can have value and provide insight if you know how to use it. 

HOW?

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• Get Software: An Inventory Management Solution is your “counting machine” that knows what is coming in, being made, being ordered, etc. Trying to manage inventory and processes with only a spreadsheet will eventually limit your efficiency and time.
• Get Mobile: Incorporate a Mobile Warehouse Tool to scan, move, and pick your items. Less time spent in data entry is a good thing.
• Get a Workflow: Count the time involved in repeatable processes and then standardize in the manner that will save your business time and hassle. Then you’ll be able to count the labor and costs saved.

Always Add Steps

The more complicated your inventory management system, the more high-end it must be, right? Akin to having a work meeting about an upcoming work meeting, the more steps involved in creating a finished service or product must indicate how great the work is. Make sure to overcomplicate very simple tasks, and require multiple sign-offs for even the most straightforward of projects. The more people you involve, the more resources you can pour in for no good reason,and the more time you can consume, the more valuable that “effort” becomes.

OR you could… Streamline Your Workflows

We’ve already touched on the need for workflows, but a process should exist to simplify the work itself and hopefully remove potential confusion. If your company’s processes create the opposite of this, it’s time to re-evaluate their value.

HOW?

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• Time It: If you’re a manufacturer, an ERP system provides the means to track time and labor per project for job costing. With this information, you can see where production hits bottlenecks.
• Plot It: Break down best, worst, and average process scenarios for business. The insight may reveal unrealized improvements, unneeded steps, or even unknown limitations of current workflows.
• Upgrade it: Imagine you do find a bottleneck in your workflow, how do you fix it? It often comes in the form of an upgrade. Upgrading tools. Upgraded workstations. Upgraded inventory training for employees.

Keep Everything in One Location

Why bother with multiple storage locations when you can just pile everything up in one giant mess? Paper files? Toss ‘em all in that big set of drawers. What about all of that critical business data kept in a single location, don’t worry about backing it up to a separate server, it’s just another thing to do. 

OR you could… Organize and Backup the Important Stuff

Organizing your storage locations sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s far too often overlooked. Creating and maintaining organized inventory storage reduces time and waste. Creating and maintaining proper business data–and backing it up–reduces time, waste, and even the possibility of losing data due to file corruption.

HOW?

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• Label Everything: Label Aisles, Rows, Shelfs, Bins, even equipment if it will help. The initial investment will save time and get new employees up to speed faster. 2D Barcodes and a corresponding scanner will make it even faster.
• Systematize Everything: Create an expectation of how the job is done, how to name files or projects, where equipment or particular documents go, etc. Good work will flow and mistakes will be easier to recognize.
• Back-up Everything: While this typically applies to all things digital–always backup your data–this mindset also applies to necessary supplies and equipment. If a significant portion of your business relies on one machine, and it breaks, do you have a back-up, or at the very least, a back-up plan?

Only One Person Gets to be in Charge

Similar to Keeping Everything in One Location, the best way to run your inventory-based business is to put all the responsibility on one person. Make sure that only one person is in charge of ordering, receiving, and tracking inventory. Even better if you make sure this single individual is the only person who understands the inventory software, and has the only login credentials. Sure, they can never call in sick or go on vacation, but at least your labor cost will be low.

Or you could… Establish Employee-Based Redundancies

Putting all your inventory responsibility on one person will lead to inefficiency and mistakes, and is often referred to as a “single point of failure”; one mishap, one sick day, one job opportunity and your business is suddenly scrambling just to stay operational. Fortunately, this ticking bomb can be defused through basic planning or forethought.

HOW?

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• Train your people: Onboard all employees with big picture understanding and job specific details, and then retrain often. 

 

• Schedule your people: Everyone deserves a break, so track what employee brings what skillset, and account for the business needs when planning schedules.

 

• Appreciate your people: So simple, but so often overlooked, your workers like to know they are valued, and that value comes in the form of recognition, respect, and pay. 

Never Change, No Matter What

This is how your dad did it, and their dad before them, so why change now? Despite years of improvements, or proven new methods, your way works, or at least it works well enough. So what if you’re not the biggest or best, you’re still in business.

OR you could… Change for the Better

Forget the size or success of your business, the point is to make it better, and that change doesn’t need to be drastic to be effective.

HOW?

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• Take in the (market) view: a rising trend in your industry may not fit your model, but it can provide insight into what is changing and how. You should want to know that.
• Take baby steps: changing a process or incorporating a new technology can be a big deal, so take your time to understand it. Once you catch the vision, run with it.
• Take what works: There will always be a bandwagon to jump on, but if you find a new approach that can save time, provide new revenue, or just make life easier, use it. Grandpa isn’t rolling in his grave if you’re making the business better.

Takeaway

Businesses don’t intentionally waste time and inventory, but without the right tools, planning, and analysis, they are inadvertently doing just that. Losing time and wasting inventory happens, but it can happen a lot less by implementing even a handful of the ideas we’ve covered.

If you’re still not sure where to start, or want some help taking your inventory to the next level, get started today!