Remember that your inventory is cash. Do you think your bank allows their employees to take samples out of the vault without tracking it? All successful companies should have the following written in large capital letters in a prominent place near their inventory and on all trucks:
NO MATERIAL LEAVES THIS AREA WITHOUT BEING CHECKED OUT!! Violators of this policy either do not understand that they are taking money out of their own pockets or they are deliberately trying to hurt the company.
There are many different ways to track items leaving the bin. Bar coding, setting each tech up with an account code, writing it down on paper, using “piggy-back” labels etc.
Whichever you choose, it should be both thorough and easy to understand as well as clearly understood by all how important it is to track what is leaving the bin.
Unfortunately, most companies only verify their stock balances once a year at best and this only leads to stock outages or overstock situations that become so old nothing can be done about it. For a typical service company it should not be unreasonable to have each bin organized and counted at a minimum twice a year for slow movers and maximum 50 times for the most popular items. Lets say you stock 1000 items. Let’s say the 80/20 rule applies (again, this is conservative because it’s usually the 90/10 rule) and there are 200 items that make up 80% of the usage “hits”, meaning number of times that item is pulled from the bin. Hopefully those 200 items are visibly separated from the rest and your stock person would be spending the large majority of time making sure those products are in good order. If that person looked over 40 of those items each day, while they were having their morning coffee for instance, each of those 200 items would be looked at once a week throughout the year. Making sure the items are in stock, the correct item is there and dealing with any overstock situation immediately can assure you your money and time are working most efficiently for your business.
For the other 800 items, that person may want to only visit that bin when one of those items had been pulled the previous day and in that case, the count frequency of that item would depend on its usage throughout the year. Again, time is only spent on those items worthy of it and no more.
