5 Reasons Why Digitizing Your Seafood Inventory is Worth It! (It’s not as difficult as you think)
There is something special about seafood. If you’re in the business of selling it, you know that all too well. Seafood is a sensitive product with precise requirements and specific storage needs. Most importantly, seafood has a short shelf life – which makes inventory management incredibly important if you want to keep your customers coming back time and time again.
However, most seafood companies use paper and clipboards to manage their inventory. Sometimes this data is transcribed into excel spreadsheets, but it’s still a slow and expensive way to manage your inventory. It’s basically impossible to find the information you need when you need it. It’s also difficult to share, both internally to your own team and externally to customers or regulators.
We get it: You probably don’t need another reason to use a digital inventory management solution for your seafood company – but hear us out! Using a digital solution can help you save money, increase efficiency, cut waste and reduce stress. If you’ve been thinking about updating your current system or are just beginning to think about the logistics of your business, here are five reasons why using a digital inventory management solution for seafood is the way to go.
Puts Money Back in Your Pocket
One of the most obvious and important benefits of using a digital inventory management solution for your seafood business is that it will help you save money. By providing accurate inventory data and managing your costs, you’ll have the foundation for controlling your profit and decreasing your expenses.
According to Planet Tracker, there is a lot of money to be saved by adding traceability solutions to your seafood inventory. For Seafood Processors, they estimate “profitability could double” if they implement a seafood traceability system. Much of these savings were the result of a reduction in labour costs, better production planning, and ease in complying with government and customer requirements.
Better Manage Your Quality
At the very core of inventory management and keeping your business afloat is knowing what you have in your inventory and what condition it is in. You have a lot of money invested in your inventory. You should know what you have on hand. A mentor of mine once said, “unless you manage cheese or wine, your quality goes down every day.”
Knowing what you have and how long it was stored can ensure you manage your product to provide the best quality. For example, managing your product via First-In-First-Out can ensure you reduce your maximum storage time. Sometimes, customers ask us to send automatic alerts when their product sits on the shelf for too long.
By better managing your quality, you ensure your customers receive the freshest product, while reducing waste.
Create Price Premiums
Digital Systems grant seafood companies the ability to set price premiums on their seafood products. This could be because they now satisfy international eco-labelling requirements, like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), or that they can easily prove to their customers, with data, they are getting a fresh and premium product.
On the other hand, by better tracking your seafood, it is easier to understand your costs and be more confident in your pricing systems. A salesperson armed with up-to-date costing is much more profitable than one without this data at their fingertips.
Relieve Stress and Pressure
I’m sure there are folks in every seafood business that could operate faster and more confidently if they had inventory data at their fingertips. For instance, a quality assurance manager will perform better during an audit, or an operations manager will be more confident hiring that extra person. Providing data to your team can empower them to perform better and reduce the stress of walking into decisions blind.
Digital Systems also let you monitor your business while you’re not there, relieving the stress of not knowing when you’re at home or on the road. Being able to remotely check that the order went out on time or that you have enough to meet the next order reduces stress and the number of check-in phone calls.
Easily Meet Traceability Requirements
There are large changes happening in the international seafood industry. As companies commit to UN Sustainability Goals and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals, the industry must prove it’s doing everything possible to reduce Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Seafood companies will need to prove their product came from reliable and sustainable sources, and they can either accomplish this by paying more people to manage file cabinets full of paper or converting over to a digital system to keep these costs down.
Final Thoughts
Seafood is a sensitive and high-value product. It has a short shelf life and must be sold quickly. It is important to have a system in place to inform you exactly how much you have. A digital inventory solution can make that process easier. It can track what comes in and out every day and help you forecast demand so you don’t run out of product and you can satisfy all your orders.
On top of this, there is a never-ending trend for all companies to go from analog (paper-based) systems to digital tools. This trend will not stop in our lifetime, and the companies that adopt these solutions will outperform and outcompete the companies that lag behind. Fortunately, these tools are now not only available to the largest companies anymore, and every seafood company can now benefit from these solutions.
Mabel provides all the hardware and software required to get you up and running, and we provide training and customization specifically for your business. It's important to us that we understand your facility and create a solution tailored to your business.
If you would like to learn more about Mabel Systems or have any questions or feedback, please reach out to me at info@mabelsystems.com
References
How to Trace USD600 Billion - Planet Tracker - https://planet-tracker.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/How-to-Trace-USD600-billion.pdf