Three challenges that highlight it's time to consider barcoding for Sage 200

Whether you're contemplating if it's the right time to introduce barcoding, or you’re looking for ways to improve your warehouse management, changing the way you are handling stock could bring significant business benefit. We’ve seen it increase productivity, visibility and accuracy for many of the distributors we work with. But more importantly, it solves the challenges they face day-to-day.

What we find with many of our Sage 200 customers handling stock is they are looking to solve three common challenges. Solve them, and you increase the effectiveness of your warehouse processes, stock control and efficiency in tasks. And you give your customers a better experience and have the room to scale operations when you need to.

Here are the top 3 challenges we find that businesses are looking to solve - do they resonate with you?

Lack of real-time visibility

The challenge: When there isn’t the real-time view of accurate stock levels there can be issues with fulfilling orders, slow response to demand, loss or theft of valuable items and other issues.

If you don’t have a view of what the stock levels are and where the stock is, it could be time to do something about it. Tell-tale signs of real-time visibility effecting you are:

• Items not available when you need them
• Regularly having too much stock of one or more item 
• Discrepancies between physical stock counts and records
• High rate of returns or complaints
• Reliance on paper based systems or spreadsheets
• Frequent need to manually check the data
• Frustration amongst your warehouse team

Picking errors that lead to returns

The challenge: Your returns are creeping up due to shipment errors, out of date product, substitutions or delays. This can really reduce the experience for the customer, leading to reputation demand and a reduction in repeat business.

Think this might be a problem you are facing? These could be signs it is:

• An increase in the returned goods
• Customer complaints about the service
• Negative reviews about accuracy of delivery
• Recurring issues with specific products
• Stock rebalancing issues
• Out of stock items that don’t match the records
• Increased refunds and disputes

Difficulty in scaling operations

The challenge: You can see the demand for what you do but when you try to scale, the processes in the warehouse let you down. Wanting to scale operations and not knowing how your people, processes and warehouse will cope is frustrating as you aim to grow and can really hold you back.

If this thought comes to mind when you discuss growth plans and think it might be a warehouse management issue, look out for:

• Inaccurate stock records 
• Difficulty dealing with peaks in demand 
• Reduced service to customers at business times
• High people costs to deliver the picking, packing and shipping
• Slow processes from order to shipment
• Competition offering more attractive service

If you face any or all of these challenges, it could be time to take a look at improving your warehouse management. The way we work with many customers overcoming these challenges is with a barcoding solution that integrates with Sage 200, such as Sicon Barcoding & Warehousing.

Tapping into the knowledge of our Sage 200 consultants whilst they put this tech in place can help you to improve warehouse design, introduce or reorganise bin locations, improve the flow of your warehouse and make life easier for your warehouse teams.   

It should free up time, effort and energy of the whole team to focus on providing a better service for customers, scaling operations to meet demand or bringing in new offerings to your customers. Or whatever else your focus is for the business.

Tech doesn’t have to be considered as ‘big bang’ transformation. Taking a look at the challenges you face and tackling them in a strategic way can lead to having a more digitised business without the headache of major change.