5 challenges distributors face keeping track of parts for small business

With an inventory management solution, you can come to peace with keeping track of parts for small business.

Growing amounts of items in inventory can be exciting for a business – you have more products to offer to your customers and your business is growing!

However, keeping up with the many additional parts is another story. Parts distributors and manufacturers have an especially daunting task of keeping up with many different parts in their inventory – it seems to be a never-ending task of simply maintaining inventory by keeping up with each of the individual parts that comprise inventory as a whole. Fortunately, the right parts inventory management solution can tame inventory management woes and help keep it accurately maintained.

Here are five ways an inventory management solution can optimize parts inventory management.

Putting the pieces of parts inventory management together

1. A scalable parts inventory management solution will be able to accommodate for ever-growing inventory

No business owner, manager, or worker should ever need to see…

Just as there shouldn’t be a limit to your business’ growth, there shouldn’t be a limit to the amount of items you should be able to store in your inventory. If your business is growing – your inventory management solution should be able to accommodate for your growing inventory!

Ensure that an inventory solution is in place that will be able to accommodate large amounts of inventory. By having a scalable inventory management solution in place, parts inventory management is prevented from becoming a potential dilemma.

I had to find something that could swallow all of our 13,000+ part numbers and our 7,000 customer files.

QuickBooks was only able to handle our accounting, not our inventory. We needed something that would be able to manage our large inventory and still be able to talk to QuickBooks.”

Jennifer Dowling, Network Administrator, Orient Express

2. Keeping track of parts for small business allows for parts to be looked up quickly and efficiently, as well as provide accurate & real-time product information

When there are many parts, it can be hard to keep track of every item. Products should be easy to look-up, with detailed product information. A comprehensive inventory management solution should also provide multiple ways to look up parts such as keywords, alternate ID, SKUs, etc.

After you do look up the product you are looking for, you should be able to see…

• Real-time data of the product such as how many are in stock, how many are backordered, etc.
• Extensively detailed product information such as (but not limited to) location, description, bill of materials (if applicable)

We have 30 different variations for some products and each spec is a little different. It’s much easier to keep all of the information in one system. When a customer calls in to get those specs, it’s all right there at our fingertips in Acctivate. It’s easy.”

Schean Barrett, Chief Operations Officer, Performance Racing Warehouse

Acctivate Inventory Management Software offers easy part look-up by offering many ways to look a product up. Additionally, product information is detailed and organized, providing you all you need to know about a product in one place.

Learn more »

3. For optimum parts inventory management, an inventory solution should provide reorder alerts

Every business has those distinct products that are integral to its business functions. These parts must be kept in inventory in adequate amounts – or else you place your business at risk of out-of-stocks and therefore unhappy customers.

The right inventory management solution can help keep your business a step ahead of the game by providing alerts when certain parts become too low in stock. The inventory management solution keeps track of inventory levels to prevent backorders on parts, so you don’t have to.

Before Acctivate, we didn’t have an inventory system at all. Once Acctivate came into play that really allowed us to increase production and profit on the inventory side of the parts business by keeping track of what we had.

Robert Archuleta, Controller, MCT Industries

4. A parts inventory management solution should provide detailed tracking and history for parts

Tracking parts comes with many challenges – parts may have gone through many different channels before reaching its end destination, not to mention the potential to be used as a component for another product.

Parts manufacturers and distributors need to ensure that parts can be kept track of, even parts that are no longer being carried, in order to provide the best customer service as well as a safeguard for product recalls.

Tracking should also be extremely detailed to identify various parts by any potential item numbers, SKUs and product IDs that may have been associated with it from the original manufacturer all the way down to the end-user.

We use serial numbers primarily for General Motors. They require serial control of the component parts we supply to them. That’s why we use it and how we use it and it gets the job done.”

Stephen Kirby, Owner, China Auto Group

Learn more about Acctivate’s traceability features such as tracking a part’s history from supplier to distributor to end-user »

5. A parts inventory management solution should integrate with other areas of business

Inventory is just one piece of business operations. Other functions of a business such as sales, purchasing, accounting, etc. are all dependent on how inventory is managed. When parts inventory is managed smoothly and efficiently, this benefits all other areas of business as well. One of the best ways to get the optimal functionality of business operations is to have a parts inventory management solution that is also equally as capable of purchasing, sales, etc.

Additionally, for fully integrated operations, a parts inventory management solution should also integrate directly with other business solutions such as eCommerce and EDI. By integrating with other platforms, business data and information is synchronized, providing your business with the tools it needs for success.

We do all of our inventory, purchasing, and some of our marketing through Acctivate – almost everything that is not on the QuickBooks accounting side.

Acctivate does a lot more things than our old software so we’ve grown the way we use it over the last few years.”

Matt Taverner, IT Administrator, McDonald ATV

Managing many pieces of inventory as a whole with Acctivate

Acctivate is a robust inventory management solution for your small-to-medium sized business. With inventory capabilities that go beyond those mentioned above, Acctivate combines inventory management with sales, purchasing, and more in a seamless manner.

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