How to manage inventory in Handle CRM.
When customers want to reserve items or put them on hold, it creates challenges around inventory management.
- When should holds be allowed? And for how long?
- Should a quote or PO be required?
- If the product goes off hold, how do you ensure the next person in line gets alerted?
- Internally, how can you keep everyone updated on inventory statuses?
To solve these issues and more, we built Handle’s Automation Engine with features that make it simple to manage inventory.
- Easily manage holds and secondary holds.
- Move sold items through inventory as quickly as possible.
- Track changes in inventory status in real time.
- Automate communications and notifications.
- Always know when items are available.
How Handle Helps You Manage Inventory
The easiest way to understand inventory workflow is to talk about holds and solds.
Most organizations want to allow their customers to put items on hold, but several issues arise when you do. In particular, people will keep equipment on hold for too long, or they put an item on hold without fulfilling basic requirements, such as a PO or quote.
To manage these issues, you have to manually monitor holds, solds, status changes, and reporting. But this can be time consuming, confusing, and prone to error.
With Handle, you can set up rules and requirements that automate just about every aspect of inventory management.
- Status changes can be changed for you.
- Notifications can be sent automatically at the appropriate time and under certain situations.
- You can set people’s permissions to perform certain activities.
- You can set up secondary holds, so when a hold times out, it’s automatically assigned to the next person in line.
And all of this can be driven or built around your existing workflows and processes.
Automating Holds, Secondary Holds, and Solds
With Handle, you can set time limits on holds. For example, you may want to limit them to 24 or 48 hours. The system will then timestamp a hold and then release the item at the appropriate time if it wasn’t purchased.
You can also require that certain types of information be included in a hold request. So if somebody wants to put something on hold, the system will check to see if the information was included. If not, a popup will ask for it.
Maybe you only want certain people to be able to do holds. If you want to prevent people from being able to do certain activities, or if you want to assign specific activities to certain users, you can set up rules around who does what.
Then, if someone tries to perform an action they aren’t allowed to do, the system will show messages like this that say, “You’re not permitted to [do whatever].”
The same types of rules can be set up for items being sold.
If you want to require a purchase order or quote before an item is sold, for example, the system will check for it in real time. If there is, then it will allow the transaction to move forward and collect the necessary information from there.
Then, to take it a step further, the system will automatically send an email to anyone who was looking at that item or was on the hold list. Some organizations even alert the entire sales staff of the status change, so they’re aware of it as it happens, in real time.
Automation Rules
Automations are extremely flexible, so you can set up Handle to streamline and even improve your existing workflow.
Here are a few of the automations you can set up:
- Alerting people to new activities and equipment statuses
- Collecting and/or looking up information
- Data requirements
- Automating notes inside the business system records, including timestamps
- Tracking dates and times of transactions, as well as the people performing those activities
The sky’s the limit. We can track, automate, and set up alerts for any activity or transaction.
Understanding Timestamps
Dealers often struggle with logging activities when they happen in different time zones. To ensure your records are accurate, we timestamp dates and times in both the local time and UTC time.
- The “Creation Date” and “Modification Date” show you the local date/time of the transaction.
- The “Note” shows you the UTC time of the transaction.
Why the difference? We built Handle to timestamp activities based on the local time of the user. But we also use EQUIP to add automated notes to the record when any activity occurs. EQUIP is a powerful system that works in the background of Handle, but it’s time-zone-agnostic. So when it adds a note, it uses UTC time.
What that means for you: When you’re checking on when a transaction occurred, look at the creation date of that transaction.
How to Get Started
To set up your inventory workflow, you need to evaluate your processes, including your existing workflow, ideas for improvement, and your ideal workflow if anything were possible.
- What rules do you want to configure?
- What restrictions would you like to put into place?
- What are the automations you’d like to set up?
If you’re unsure about anything, we can work with you to design a workflow that works for your unique situation. We’ll even show you examples of what’s possible and make suggestions. Contact Texada support to get started.