Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

We got done with inventory today. It looks like we located items we had written off when they weren't in the right spot... and we even found more than had grown legs for once. So now that we know where everything is and how many we have, I think we're ready to ship it out by the truckload for the holidays. Ah yes... 4th quarter, when warehouses and wallets shall both run empty. It seems those are connected this time of year.

Well, I got out of counting by entering the data into our Inventory Management System. I'm not sure if that was worse or better. On the one hand, I didn't have to get up on ladders or try to hunt down where on the sheets the item was. On the other hand, I was stuck using a computer with a 15" CRT and lots of glare - not to mention it locked up on me several times. But with how our system is set up, I didn't even have to use most of the keyboard for my job. Tomorrow we'll be finishing up counting, then we'll finalize it and the inventory on our website will update automagically. At least that part of the technology is cool, even if the manual entry of everything isn't all that much fun.

Physical inventory. Two words I dread more than, well, anything. Ok, so "We need to talk" would scare me more. But in this virtual age, why can't I count all the bits and bytes while the people who deal with physical goods deal with the physical inventory? That'd be fair, right? Look, I can do it now. df -v Ok, so that's a bit of Linux humor, and not all that good either. But physical inventory with orders literally flying in the door is going to be interesting to say the least. But I guess it's better to have too many orders than not enough. I better get started counting. 1, 2, 3, 4...

So we've decided to start looking at new inventory management systems. We're going to take a look at the advantages / disadvantages of custom as well as the good and bad of many existing software. We haven't decided if we're moving to something new or not, but it seems like if we're not seeing what's out there we could be missing some great opportunities. Anyone with suggestions of software to look at, let me know. Comments are fine... just try to provide a URL so we can take a look at it. We're well beyond something like Quickbooks, and we realize that this probably isn't going to be cheap. But if we don't look, we won't know what we are or are not missing.

The carousels are finally working at 100%. I hope they stay that way now. If we just had more hours in the day to get everything on them now, we'd be set. That being said, we've got some inventory management issues that needed addressed as well. For some unknown reason, our system was set to throw out the largest order, then make sure we had 50% more than the second largest order in stock. For items that we were averaging a few per year without the occasional large order we now have large quantities of. What a mess. Now that we're stocking more of the first few brands, though, we're getting more orders out the door in a faster manner. There are more and more orders in stock at the time they're placed. Now, if we could just get them all pulled, boxed, and out the door same day we'd be really cool. We started looking at some of our competitors this week. Competitors? That's funny. In any case, they're selling things at a competitive price. We're paying...