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Streamline your Inventory

Have you ever experienced dead stock, overstocking or stockouts when it comes to managing your inventory?

If so, it’s likely your current business management (ERP or Seed-to-sale) system is lacking the ability to manage your operations, but that’s okay because these common problems are experienced by manufacturers across all industry markets. Depending on the type of issue that may arise, it’s probably indicating the root cause of what your inventory system is lacking.

For example:

Dead stock may indicate you’re not receiving enough visibility over product sale performance and product quantities
Overstock and stockouts may indicate your inventory lacks communication with your incoming and in-production sales orders

So before we break down how you can go about fixing these problems, let’s take a look at what success looks like.

We’ve collated some indicators that can signify your inventory management system is successful:

Your lead time for manufacturing and delivery reduces over a period of time
You achieve a decrease in the costs across inventory including the transportation of your products
Using your storage space to its maximum capacity in order to maintain a well-organized inventory

The power of being able to recognize and read patterns within your operations is important but can be hard to do when your systems are opaque. When your systems provide visibility you’re able to iterate efficiently and implement these successfully across your processes. When it comes to learning how to manage your inventory, it's important we start by defining and understanding what inventory actually is and the different parts that go into making it work.

There are four main parts of your inventory, and each one needs to be tracked separately:

Raw Materials: These are the items used to create your finished products (in Blakthumb we’ve gone a step further and added another category to help define the difference between Plant and General materials)
Goods in Production: This is where you track the making process of your end product
Finished Goods: These are the completed products. Completed items can be an assembly item of a packaged product or it’s the packaged product that is ready to be sold.
Machinery: This is the equipment you use to produce your goods.

To ensure your production operates consistently like a well-oiled machine, it’s important you’re tracking across these four parts of inventory. The data points you will need to track to ensure everything is operating as planned we’ve listed below. These provide an insightful birds-eye view of how your operations are performing.

So let’s take a look at the key data points to track:

Safety stock: Identifying fast-moving products (your highest selling product) and long lead time products is essential. Calculate ****how much excess product you should keep on-hand in case of supply chain issues
Costs Per Unit: How much one unit of inventory costs to manufacture or supply to then gauge an understanding of what the product costs at scale
Order cycle time: How long it takes to fulfil customer orders on average

All of this might sound like a lot of work, but it's essential to keeping your inventory under control.

So what approach can you implement that can effortlessly deliver a successful inventory system for your operations?

Let’s take a look at a perpetual approach for managing your inventory. We recommend this as it suits all environments and can be beneficial in fast-paced and complex operations like cannabis manufacturing. That's because of its hyper-focussed, continuous tracking ability across materials and products in real-time.

With a perpetual inventory system you should see:

Real-time information
Where sales, POs and manifests are integrated with production
Transparency over production with visibility across progress & completion
Complete inventory control - this approach drives detailed and accurate insights

How does a perpetual approach work in Blakthumb’s inventory update?

Our objective is to support cannabis operators by enabling them with an integrated system across production and inventory. We see this approach is key if you want to optimize your production and profitability.

These are key outcomes from integrating production control with inventory:

Inventory Consolidation: Access your inventory across all areas in one convenient location and receive alerts of when your PAR levels are low, triggering a PO or more production. We alleviate the guesswork by providing users with real-time updates of inventory quantities, locations and production costs.

Connect production with sales: By integrating your sales orders with production on the floor, you receive live updates and alerts of when product will be ready. As your jobs are completed on the floor, your inventory levels are automatically updated live. Giving you up-to-date information on how much is being used on the floor In real time. This helps you determine losses like waste, misplacement of product, and expiration more accurately.

Complete control of your deliveries and manifests: Create and holding all of your manifests in one place allows you and your team to stay in the loop with any late changes or updates to your sales orders. Because your production and inventory are connected, you can schedule your operations to deliver your orders on time, access the status of your orders, and be alerted when they’re ready.

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Managing your inventory shouldn’t be problematic nor should it be complex. Our unique features can transform your inventory management by providing a comprehensive view of your operations, allowing you to revamp and streamline your inventory processes for maximum efficiency.

Find out more about how Blakthumb’s production-to-inventory can be the solution for you and your operations.

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