A New Beginning For your Inventory Management Journey
To those who have just signed up for our expert consulting services, congratulations! This is the first step on your journey to employ your inventory management system to its fullest. You probably have many questions in anticipation for your first meeting with us. Who should I invite? How should I prepare? How long is the appointment?
To answer this, we need to look at what the purpose of the first meeting is. More than anything else, this is our chance to dig deep and truly get to know you and your business. This is essential because at Brandow Consulting, we don’t do one-size-fits-all solutions. We recognize that every company is starting from their own unique place and will need to be assisted based upon their specific situation and workflow needs. Consequently, the first item on our agenda is to do a thorough discovery process that gets into the real issues that you are facing, the requirements you have, the size and scope of your operation, etc. Our philosophy is that the better we know you, the better we can help you.
Purpose for the IMS Business Discovery Process
Our first step of the discovery process thus is understanding the way that the inventory management system is currently set up and how it’s used. To do this we will perform what is called a file analysis, which entails showing us through a screen share how everything from the parts, the locations, the accounts, etc. is being employed.
During this process we seek to understand the specific goals you are looking to accomplish as well as identify any red flags that would inhibit you from realizing them. This process could take anywhere from a half hour to two hours, depending upon the size of your company.
For the remainder of the first meeting, we will provide you with a professional estimate of how long the project should take as well as well as everything that we hope to accomplish with you. It is not essential to have every person on the team present for this first appointment, because it is our chance to learn rather than instruct. As such, little to no preparation is necessary for the initial meeting on your end.
Later Steps for Warehouse Management Improvement and Integration
Once this is out of the way, we will move on to documenting a desired overall workflow. This is the part where we make a roadmap of what you would like the software to do for you as well as how it should ideally operate. But rather than remain a rigid and stagnant approach that must not be deviated from, it is instead a flexible and evolving plan of action that will be added to and revised throughout your digital transformation process.
This is the point at which we will begin to determine who on the team should be assigned to specific roles throughout the workflow process. At this stage we like to start experimenting and questioning current practices and assignments with regards to what your company is trying to accomplish, always seeking to push the inventory software’s efficacy to its limits in terms of how it interacts with your team and preferred process.
Inventory Software Improvement Timeline
All of this will span over the course of the first one to three appointments. After this we will continue working with you, following our model five step program, in a pace that will go as quickly as you can handle it. We like to say that in order to have a successful experience with your inventory software, it needs to be set up right, and it needs to be used right. By following these crucial initial steps, we will help you ensure that your software implementation story is a rousing success.
