Modernize Your Supply Chain Management

A new Software Advice report offers a lot of interesting insights into what types of companies bought supply chain management software in 2016. This line from the article is particularly telling: “It’s a familiar tale: A small third-party logistics (3PL) or manufacturing firm has been getting by using pen and paper, clunky spreadsheets or outdated software. But now, they’re at a crossroads and must either upgrade their IT infrastructure or languish.” Exactly. As small businesses get bigger and face more logistics challenges, it’s simply not cost effective to keep depending on old, outdated methods of managing inventory. They have to modernize or else they won’t be able to keep up with their more advanced competitors.

Old Inventory Systems

According to Software Advice’s findings, supply chain management software buyers currently use:

• Commercial supply chain management software (46 percent)
• Manual methods (28 percent)
• QuickBooks (19 percent)
• Spreadsheets (18 percent)
• Proprietary system (17 percent)
• Legacy system (6 percent)

We’ll get into commercial supply chain management software more in a later blog post, but for now let’s focus on the more than half of all buyers who are using manual, outdated processes to manage their inventory. Manual methods refer to scraps of paper with irreplaceable inventory information. If those papers get lost or destroyed, a company won’t have any backup system to help them out of the jam they’ll find themselves in. QuickBooks is great for accounting, but it can’t provide scalable inventory features that growing companies need. Excel spreadsheets are good at storing information, but they’re not always easy to retrieve information from or update when changes occur. And proprietary and legacy systems that are set up by one employee who leaves the company will be difficult to understand by employees who come after.

Modernize with Fishbowl

What businesses are looking for is a supply chain management solution that will bring them out of their antiquated processes and give them the tools they need to modernize their way of handling their inventory. Fishbowl does that. Fishbowl is a business automation platform that solves all of the pitfalls of the solutions above. It automates many processes, from reordering to shipping, and keeps data safely stored and readily available in digital form. It integrates with QuickBooks to provide the features QuickBooks lacks while also eliminating double data entry by instantly updating the accounting solution when it receives changes. It can use spreadsheets to import and export data while also generating detailed reports on sales trends, barcodes, and more. And Fishbowl has extensive training videos and information in the Fishbowl Wiki to guide users through its modules and features. So anyone can learn how to use it. Best of all, Fishbowl is scalable and it integrates with numerous other business solutions beyond QuickBooks. It’s the modern way to manage inventory and much more. We’ll get deeper into that in next week’s blog post: “Supply Chain Management Software That’s Just Right.” Stay tuned!