Vendor Managed Inventory, or VMI, has been growing in popularity over the last few years. With the world of e-commerce growing across various platforms, people have been needing a way to control their supplies and products easily and efficiently.
Warehouse. Credit: Tiger Lily / Pexels / CC0
Credit: Tiger Lily / Pexels / CC0
VMI allows the manufacturers and suppliers of a product to control inventory management decisions for the sellers of a product. It takes some of the responsibility off of the seller so that they can spend more time taking care of other aspects of their business. It’s growing in popularity because it makes it easier to sell products in this ever-growing world of e-commerce stores.
Making Things Easier
VMI is growing in popularity because it makes keeping track of production and supply so much easier. When you use VMI in your business, you are allowing a third party to keep track of the inventory of your products. With inventory being such a huge aspect of business management, having that responsibility taken care of makes everything else easier to keep track of.
VMI also decreases the number of possible errors that can occur in the inventory tracking of your production. You are less likely to encounter data errors when you use a third-party source that is an expert on managing inventory. Not only does this increase efficiency, but it also reduces the stress of having to double or triple-check for errors.
Getting a Tailored Experience
When you use a VMI, you get an experience that is completely tailored to your company and production. Using a VMI allows you to get the data that is your highest priority and make decisions that are within your company’s best interest.
Many VMIs out there provide a tailored experience. TFC is one of the various companies out there that will put your company first with its vendor managed inventory services. With TFC, you get a whole team that will give continuous support and advice to make the best decisions for your company’s inventory. They have a wide range of expertise that will aid them in making your inventory a top priority. With them, you don’t have to stress over managing your company’s inventory, they will take care of most of the work.
Cost Reduction
Mistakes can be expensive. Time is also expensive. VMI reduces both the time you spend and the mistakes that can happen while managing your inventory. It may seem costly at first to rely on VMI to manage your inventory, but taking into consideration the data you’ll receive, the reduction of time and stress spent on making sure everything is correct, and the expert proposals that will be sent out, it is worth the price.
Using the expertise that a VMI provides will reduce the overall cost that would be spent on managing the resources of your company.
How Did VMI Become So Popular?
As soon as big companies began to use VMI to control their inventory, the popularity of the resource exploded. Walmart and Proctor & Gamble were some of the big companies that popularized using VMIs back in the 1980s.
From there, several other big companies started to use VMIs and have seen a huge profit increase along with a labor decrease. Home Depot and Amazon have started to use VMIs after the first initial popular wave. Amazon proved that VMIs can be extremely useful in the world of e-commerce since Amazon does most of its business on the internet.
Today, thousands of companies both big and small use VMI to reduce the cost of managing inventory and increase their profit.
The Surge of Small Businesses
For small businesses, using a VMI helps take the stress off of your team. Small businesses usually run on a small team and have a limited number of resources compared to big companies. Using a VMI helps reduce the responsibility on the team to manage the inventory so that they can put more resources into other business aspects.
In today’s world of increased e-commerce and small businesses, there is a higher demand for using a VMI. This higher demand contributes to the more recent rise in popularity that VMIs are experiencing. E-commerce benefits greatly from using a VMI as it helps keep managing inventory more organized amongst everything else that needs to be managed digitally.
Overall, VMIs contribute to efficiency, lower costs to a company, and better data customization. Big companies use VMIs which makes them more appealing to many other companies both big and small to use for themselves.
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