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5 Reasons You Need to Forecast for Effective Supply Chain Management

5 Reasons You Need to Forecast for Effective Supply Chain Management

While there may be a never-ending list of unknowns – snowstorms, supply shortages, skyrocketing oil prices – that you can’t prepare your business for, taking some time to dial in your supply chain forecasting is essential to the overall health and growth of your business.

If you don’t keep an eye on whether your supply is managed effectively, you could be losing serious money, which means your business will grow more slowly than you’d like.

Here are 5 reasons you need to forecast for effective supply chain management:

 

Optimize Your Inventory

You know that having too low a stock on a hot item can be a death knell for sales. And having too much of something that’s not selling eats up money with storage, transportation, and other costs. By looking carefully at your sales and your supply chain and then predicting when you’ll need how much of a product, you’re saving your business money in overstocking and maintaining sales that would be lost to understocking.

 

Customer Satisfaction

Having happy customers is always the goal of any business, right? Most customers are pretty forgiving, and understand if something’s going to be out of stock for a short time. However, with effective supply chain management through forecasting, you can prevent many of these product shortages, giving you happier customers.

 

Improve Resource Scheduling

With increased demand comes an increased need for all those resources necessary to getting products to customers – staff, warehouse space, and transportation, for example. If you can predict when you will need more people and resources to meet customer demands, you will decrease interruptions in the shipping process and get products to your customers in a timely manner. On the flip side, if you can forecast a seasonal dip in ordering, you can adjust your staffing needs accordingly to save money.

 

Decrease Costs

It’s expensive to keep a stash of extra products, even a small one, on hand. It can also be dangerous, depending on where and how you store them. By forecasting your supply needs, you’ll be able to avoid unnecessary expenditures on stocking and warehousing too many products. This improves your bottom line and preserves extra money for those times when you do see demand tick up and need more stock.

 

Enhance Transportation Logistics

Combining shipments or transportation methods to save money is all well and good, but with forecasting you can improve the product transport process even farther. If you have a handle on when you’ll see increased demand for certain products, you can create a full transportation strategy to help eliminate redundancies and decrease costs.

 

Experienced Supply Chain Management Support in Maryland

At Cannon Hill Logistics, we want to see your business succeed. Whether you need warehousing and shipping support, or you need someone to handle order receipt and returns processing, we can create a custom logistics solution to meet your needs. Contact us today to discuss your unique needs so your business can thrive!

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