What is the inventory management process?

The inventory management process is how you manage and track the inventory of your products, including what you acquire to produce or prepare them for sale. It’s a continuous process that doesn’t end until the inventory is sold, discounted, donated, or simply declared as a loss and carted away. For that reason, it’s another one of those skills, like bookkeeping or hiring, that’s a core part of running a business — and one you need to hone from the moment you launch. 

This article will answer some of your basic questions about the inventory management process and cover the tools to make the process easier. If you’re interested in taking a deeper dive, check out our guide to inventory management.

Is inventory management the same as supply chain management?

Not quite. While the two terms overlap, supply chain management is more about sourcing and buying inventory. Inventory management specifically refers to when that inventory is in your possession.

If you think of a major manufacturer of cars, aircraft, appliances, and other large items, it’s easy to see that just acquiring the inventory necessary to operate is a huge undertaking. That’s the job of a supply chain manager. Once the company has the materials, inventory managers are then responsible for storing and delivering them for use as needed. 

Inventory management is a crucial part of effectively running a business with a tangible product — whether that’s a contractor on a job site or a restaurant owner stocking a kitchen for the dinner rush. Keeping track of everything you need to carry out your business is critical if you want to get work done each day, but it also helps you set benchmarks and judge your efficiency. And at a more basic level, you need it to determine your profitability and file an accurate tax return.

Why do small and medium businesses (SMBs) need an inventory management process?

Inventory management and business strategy are closely linked. In the early 1970s, Japanese manufacturers came up with “just-in-time” inventory management, which focused on keeping inventory costs low by always having enough but avoiding having too much. Toyota, under the guidance of the legendary industrial engineer Taiichi Ohno, formalized this within the Toyota Production System (TPS). The TPS remains a widely adopted model for constant improvement and waste reduction.

Although the big enterprises like Toyota obviously face vastly more complicated inventory management challenges than SMBs do (and have the specialists and sophisticated software to help), SMB owners still feel those same pressures. You have to make stressful choices about how much stock or raw material to hold in your inventory, keeping in mind all the associated costs and risks if you buy too much or too little — and this is where a robust process comes in. 

If you have a business that requires inventory, you probably have an inventory management system already. But even if it works just fine, there are a few easy-to-use tech tools that can drastically reduce the time it takes to manage your inventory, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. 

How can Jotform help with inventory?

Inventory management is listed among the business management specialisms — and rightly so. But at a very basic level, it’s just three activities: sorting, counting, and tracking. Jotform inventory templates are helpful tools to make the leap from tracking inventory with pen and paper to digital. You can quickly customize the templates for your business, and they’re even useful for managing inventory at home or elsewhere outside of work. All data is stored securely in your Jotform account, so it’s accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection. 

You can also convert your customized templates into polished PDFs that are easy to download, print, or view on any device, and an e-signature widget allows you to keep your signoff process the same. Plus, with Jotform barcode scanner widgets, you can scan a barcode with your smartphone camera and send it to an inventory template.

As you know, having inventory you can’t sell is bad, but selling more products than you actually have is just as bad. In fact, it might be worse since you now have to refund an angry customer! But if you use the Jotform inventory widget, you can prevent people from adding an out-of-stock item to their cart. It’s especially useful when you have limited inventory or you’re selling tickets to an event with a certain number of seats.

There’s an old saying that goes, “You don’t fatten lambs by weighing them.” It’s a similar thing with inventory: Doing a good job of it won’t boost sales, but doing a poor job of it will hurt your business. Jotform templates and widgets make it easy for you to put a state-of-the-art inventory management process in place — without having to go back to college or hire a specialist. Or feed any livestock for that matter.

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