It has become increasingly apparent that streamlined veterinary inventory management is key to a successful and profitable practices. At ezyVet, we believe every practice, despite their size, should be confident that their inventory levels are accurate to ‘right size’ their inventory investment and have the required stock to take good care of patients.
From veterinary inventory management courses to cloud-based inventory management software, the one question that remains is, “How can practices apply best practices to take control of their inventory management?”
This two-part blog series is woven with best practices and will take you through steps you can action to set the foundation for your new or existing inventory, and help you take control of your inventory management through digitized process management. We’ll also show you how to make these best practices a reality by using ezyVet Scan.
Key takeaways:
- Part 1: Set the foundation for your new or existing inventory.
- Align your product categories with your software systems.
- Organise your products according to priority.
- Easily identify products on the go.
- Ditch the manual inventory processes and go digital.
- Incorporate inventory counts into your team’s routine.
- Manage barcodes effortlessly.
- Transfer inventory seamlessly between locations.
Part 1: Set the foundation for your new or existing inventory
Align your product categories with your software systems
Good setup and good usage equal good numbers – that’s the mantra of inventory.
The first step of any veterinary management inventory guide will tell you how important it is to ensure the software you use to manage your inventory should be closely aligned with the accounting software you use to manage your business finances. This makes for coherent financial reporting, and accurate stock numbers.
An easy way to align the two is by ensuring the categories for your products defined in the accounting system are set up as the same product categories in your inventory management system. Fortunately, veterinary software with inventory management built into it – like ezyVet! – makes it easy to align your inventory categories. Make sure your products are categorized consistently: For example, the antibiotics are all categorized together, and the nutrition products are categorized together.
These categories depend on the focus, size, and type of practice so they will vary, and the level of detail that you want to go into here will be totally dependent on you.
Pro tip: You can watch the “Best practices for veterinary inventory management webinar” to see exactly how to set categories and product groups up in ezyVet.
Organise your products according to priority
Use the popular method called ABC analysis to identify and prioritise your top selling and most valuable products. Divide these into three groups – A, B, and C – so that you know what to spend your time and effort on to maximize your profits.
Group A should be the top 20% of your products which generate 80% of your practice revenue from stock. Those items be prioritized for stock/availability, affordability, and convenience.
Then look for the next 30% of your products that are highest revenue generators in your buy/sell cycle, and call these Group B.
Group C will be whatever is left in your buy/sell cycle, making up the final 50% of your products.
The fastest way to figure this out is to run a revenue report at a product level from the last three-to-six months. In ezyVet's business reporting module, you’ll generate an “Invoice revenue by group” report, export the .CSV file, and filter by revenue.
Easily identify products on the go
Physically color code your products according to their ABC grouping. That way it’s easy to keep an eye on stock levels at a glance and how urgent it is to replenish.
- Red products: Group A – These 20% are your top sellers and most high priority stock. You’ll want to ensure you don’t run out of these as they are used daily and orderedregularly. These are likely to be pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and flea/deworming products.
- Orange products: Group B – These 30% are medium priority products, which you’ll need to be monitor carefully as they’re easy to forget because you’re not using them as often, yet they are critical if not on-hand. These may be items like pet food or cones.
- Yellow products: Group C – These are your remaining 50% and of the lowest priority. It’s easier to maintain stock levels of these items because they can be ordered and replenished within a few days. These might be items like tongue depressors, cotton balls or gauze – the types of consumables used every day and kept in larger quantities.
Some practices choose not to include consumables in their ABC analysis. However, that depends on whether you include them in your cost to consult or cost of goods reports
Conclusion
There are a lot of things you can do to build capability and refineyour inventory management – like getting deeper into the numbers with markup versus margins etc. –but we've chosen to focus onthese simple steps as we believe they are the most impactful when laying foundationscorrectly. The key is to lay the foundations in a way that's easy for your staff to use and maintain.Whether you're starting a new practice or already have your inventory set up and running, these are three things you can do to re(organise) your products to take control of your inventory processes.
Click here to read the next four thingsyou can do to set your team up for success with digitized processes. We'll show you how to use ezyVet's free, mobile, inventory management app which is fully integrated with ezyVet's inventory and updates data in realtime.
If you'd like to get set up with ezyVet Scan book a demo to see in detail how ezyVet inventory works with Scan to streamline and simplify inventory management. Or join the ezyVet team on a short webinar – we'll show you how to action best practices using ezyVet Scan. Click the button below to register.
Register here.
