Whether you’re in warehouse management, retail, or even the restaurant business, you’re probably already aware of how important inventory management control is. Much has been written on the subject, and if you want to get started on controlling and managing your inventory it can get a little overwhelming.

While there’s far more to it than this, and every business will have to customize these tips for their inventory, location, and industry, we’ve assembled these three tips to help get you started off on the right track for refining your inventory management process:

Prioritize

The very idea of managing your inventory can be fairly intimidating depending on the size of your warehouse and facility, and cutting out the fat and deciding on what needs to be worked on first is the most important part.

Focus on the items that matter most – by and large, 80% of your demand and sales will come from the most popular 20% of your items. Start with categorizing and filing these items first, and focus on scheduling re-orders and forecasting for demand for these top sellers. The rest can trickle down from there, and it will get easier if you do the more popular items first.

Physical Inventory Control

Physical inventory control is exactly what it sounds like: logging, maintaining, and properly storing all on-hand physical inventory.

Start by making sure you have enough industrial storage solutions to maintain all of your inventory on-site and keep it easily accessible. From there, work out a better filing system, either physically, digitally, or both, to make sure the items are easily findable when needed. Finally, make sure to hammer down your shipment process to ensure items are logged and received appropriately when they arrive to cut down on inventory errors.

Establish Good Habits

Once the inventory is all arranged and accounted for, you need to make sure you and your staff develop good management habits to prevent issues down the road. Train your staff on proper paperwork filing, how to correctly fill out a purchase order, and make sure all inventory counts are done correctly and on time. This one is more of a long-term goal, to be sure, but it will make sure all your hard work in controlling your inventory doesn’t go to waste.