Categories: Inventory Management
By Mark Tomalonis
Principal, WarehouseTWO, LLC
Your outside sales people will LOVE this “Stock Request” form!
Eh, maybe not so much. We know a few outside sales people who are not fans of paperwork.
But if you are responsible for inventory management, and you find it hard to say “NO” to an outside sales person’s casual request that you put something into stock even though you have never sold it before, then YOU may love this form, and the simple process that goes with it.
What? Printed documents that are filled in manually, and then passed around and filed??? What are we thinking? No worries. The purpose of this article is to present business process concepts and examples of process forms. How you implement these ideas and forms, and whether you do so using printed documents or paperless forms is up to you. We chose to present printable forms for instant deployment by those who are comfortable with managing such “classic” technology.
What personality traits make for successful sales people? “Optimism”, “self-confidence” and “willingness to take risks”. Add to that mix “lack of attention to detail” and “lack of accountability” and the result is over-exuberance to put new items into stock. But putting an item into stock that you have never sold before is risky. An effective way to support a sales person’s sales efforts, while minimizing the chance of buying future surplus inventory, is to create a formal stock request process with supporting documentation. The benefits of a formal stock request process include:
A formal stock request process can consist of two process-specific documents and a few simple steps:
Documents:
Stock Request Form: records the sales person’s request, and your initial stock plan implementation.
Stock Request Quarterly Review Form: triggers four quarterly reviews of the original stock request, to provide multiple opportunities to modify the speculative stock plan (or get rid of the speculative inventory, perhaps while still under warranty, if actual sales fall far short of forecasted sales).
Process steps:
As addenda to this article, we have attached a sample “Stock Request Form” and a “Stock Request Quarterly Review Form”, with instructions on how to use them. Even if these forms are not perfectly suitable for your business, consider them as catalysts to help you create forms and processes that work best for your business.
Once you have implemented a speculative stock plan in support of a sales person’s formal stock request, review the results four times, each time after a three-month interval. It is important that you compare actual sales to originally forecasted sales, and make appropriate changes to your speculative stock plan. An easy way to do this is with a “Stock Request Quarterly Review Form”, and a method of creating a reminder to perform the quarterly reviews. Entering four “appointments” into a PC-based calendar is a paperless way to do this.
In the absence of such an electronic event scheduler, consider creating a “Reminder Binder”. A “Reminder Binder” can be as simple as a three-ring binder with a divider for each month. Place a completed “Stock Request Form” and its accompanying “Stock Request Quarterly Review Form” behind the tab corresponding to three months after the month during which the speculative stock plan was put into place. Each month, turn to the tab for that month, remove the stock request forms from that tab, review the requests, and then place the completed forms back into the binder behind the tab three months into the future. Hold someone accountable for managing the forms kept in the “Reminder Binder”.
It’s not a perfect world. Life is unfair. Here are some possible challenges associated with using this “Stock Request” form and process, and how to deal with them.
Even if your company is completely “paperless”, the ability to create custom business forms (for internal or external use) can help your business processes run more smoothly. Our favorite applications to create printable or electronic business forms are MS Word, MS Excel and MS Visio.
To create a form that is printable by anyone without the PC application with which the form was created, create a copy of the form as a PDF document. (Most applications allow you to save the document this way.) PDF documents can be printed using Adobe’s free “Acrobat Reader” application. Forms made in Excel or Word can be filled in electronically, and can perform basic calculations and field copying. If you distribute electronic versions of forms, be sure to password-protect them from being edited. (With Excel, you can prevent the document from being edited, but still allow selected fields to be filled in and saved.) Who at your company knows how to create business forms?
Click on these links to download sample forms and instructions:
Stock Request Form Instructions
Stock Request Quarterly Review Form
Stock Request Quarterly Review Form Instructions
About the Author
After a successful career in sales and operations management in the wholesale-distribution industry, Mark Tomalonis is now principal of WarehouseTWO, LLC. He amuses himself by writing articles, such as this one, to help wholesaler-distributors execute their operations better. Mark’s articles and tips are published in WarehouseTWO’s monthly e-newsletters. Click here to subscribe.
About WarehouseTWO
WarehouseTWO, LLC is an independent “inventory-sharing” service created exclusively for durable goods manufacturers and their authorized distributors, and for any group of durable goods “peer” wholesaler-distributors, such as members of a buying/marketing group or cooperative. To learn how inventory-sharing with WarehouseTWO can help your business, visit the WarehouseTWO website, or email info@warehousetwo.com.