Real-Time Inventory Management

With the present serious worldwide economy, it’s nothing unexpected that manufacturing industries are continually attempting to reduce expenses and improve efficiency. It’s typically in the ability to produce an item at a barely lower cost, quicker time, greater value, or a combination of factors that separates market pioneers from the rest of the crowd.  

We know that one of the most significant pieces to acknowledging enhancements in cost and efficiency is in advancing the quality variable. Achieving essential quality data frequently requires a lot of instruments or tools, for example, Real-Time Inventory management to give continuous visibility into the effectiveness and stability of procedures. 

You must come across numerous management software that helps a lot to plan and manage assembly line parts inventory. Here we will discuss more explicitly about the “Assembly line” shop floor inventory management in real-time and efficiently.  

For what reason is it significant to have an inventory management system for the assembly line?  

• A manufacturer can reduce cost by optimizing the inventory to minimum amount/time  
• Eliminate the stock-out via system generated notifications  
• Always timely process the production and avoid delayed customer deliveries  
• Analyze trends in withdrawals and usage  
• Real-time inventory helps to abolish devastation  
• Eliminate unsellable deadstock  
• Avoid filching inventory items  
• Real-time data and analytics help the decision-makers to take timely actions  
• It improves cash flow management  
• Ease of running a business with real-time insights

If we investigate more in detail, we have to oversee various kinds of stock as below:  

1. Inventory of Raw Material  
2. Inventory of finished goods as indicated by Work-In-Progress status 
3. Inventory in Transit mode  
4. Inventory of buffer materials 

Let’s talk about normal ways rehearsed in various businesses by individuals to manage inventory. 

1. Manual Records: It needs lots of human efforts and increases the chances of error or blundering data. Toward the year’s end accountable individual checks all the physical items and ensure that it coordinates what’s on the record book. It’s regular for little and medium organizations to deal with these tallied reports as for stock. This procedure needs additional time, endeavors, and inclusion of numerous individuals together. Now a day, they began to utilize software to lessen the efforts and counting activities but again it needs to feed accurate data.
2. Tagging based improved process: It’s an upgraded version of manual inventory method by adding tags and scanning devices. It really improves the performance and accuracy yet again it can’t be constant, additionally, there are conceivable outcomes of mistake. One popular concept, PTL (Pick-to-Light), has been implemented to manage Raw materials just as finished product inventory. It reduced the human efforts and blunder. It requires the least user interaction and actionable inputs. The rest of the things have been taken care of by a fully automatic system mounted with rack. It has capabilities to update each detail to the server directly which could be reflected in a central inventory management system. Big companies acknowledge this strategy widely for their production house.  

Smart Solution  

Today cutting-edge technologies provide ease of comfort to grow more accurate inventory systems with innovative product solutions that could manage and monitor the End-to-End process automatically. Moreover, it assists with monitoring your production work-in-progress. 

In other words, we can call it, Industries 4.0, a revolution in the Inventory management system. Below technologies can be utilized to build such a system.  

• Smart sensors 
• Internet of Things 
• Line follower robotics 
• Low power light-weight communication 
• Cyber technologies for data analytics and predictive modeling 

This smart solution wouldn’t be restricted to just inventory management, it provides many more benefits to truly re-evaluate your factory into a smart factory.