Should it be this difficult? Not Really!
Today’s post is by Ronald D. Southard. CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.
What issues are you having with you inventory?
We hear a variety of issues/excuses every day of the week.
- Cannot get the items you want even if they are on order
- Cannot figure out acceptable substitutes for items you cannot get
- Cannot find a new or additional sources of supply to make up the difference.
- Stuck in a sole source environment.
- Not sure of what inventory you should commit to post pandemic.
- Not enough workers available to manage incoming inventory or returns.
- Do not want to tie up too much capital on potentially excess inventory.
- To many yet unknown supply chain issues to deal with!
- Not structured properly to decentralize inventory.
- No collaboration program with other companies that may have inventory to share.
I could add another ten issues right of the top of my head! Why? Because we hear it every single day from every single customer as well as every single supplier. Many retail customers do not have products to fill orders and many suppliers do not have product capacity to bid on new business.
There are creative ways to work around these situations. They may not fix all your issues, but they well may fix or solve many of them and keep customers from looking elsewhere.
Is it secret sauce you might ask? In some sense yes, because companies like SafeSourcing, a SaaS based sourcing platform for all categories know where alternative sources of supply are because we deal with more of them than you do on a regular basis. We also must produce temporary solutions for the current situation of which you may not think.
I am however not going to share any detail with you. If you think I addressed some of your issues, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services representative and we can talk. We might save your people invaluable time that can be used in other areas. If you would like to speak with me directly, Contact SafeSourcing and they will transfer the call.
Best of Luck!
