Why Lose Money and Time on Ineffective Consignment Inventory Management?
Your “trunk stock” is mobile, so your consignment inventory management should be too. In this post, we’ll review the challenges medical device manufacturers face when managing their inventory of trunk stock, and introduce a solution to painlessly simplify the process of consignment inventory management.
What is Trunk Stock?
“Trunk stock” refers to the inventory that sales representatives carry with them for on-the-spot sales or demonstrations. It’s normally transported in rolling cases in the trunk of a car. For medical device manufacturers, managing this type of trunk stock inventory can be complicated and costly. For instance, during implant surgeries, only a portion of the products in the implant surgical kit are typically utilized. While these other items are on hand to ensure preparedness, it poses a challenge for the manufacturer when they need to return the unused items to active inventory. This is where efficient consignment inventory management plays a crucial role.
Challenges of Medical Device Trunk Stock
To ensure proper sanitation, any unused surgical kit items must be sent to a centralized facility for cleansing, reassembly as needed, repackaging, and eventual restocking. This kind of trunk stock is actually a time intensive consignment inventory management exercise with plenty of opportunity for errors.
Poor management of trunk stock consignment inventory results in higher costs for both suppliers and customers:
Supplier Challenges: Lack of visibility into product or component consumption; labor intensive manual processes; ineffective consignment inventory management.
Customer Challenges: Overstocking; expirations and write-offs; missed charge capture and clinical documentation.
A Better Approach to Consignment Inventory Management
To address these challenges, Strategic Information Group offers a mobile-enabled QAD ERP bolt-on application that makes trunk stock and consignment processes automatic, simple and accurate—from anywhere, on any device.
Strategic’s proprietary “Mobile Trunk Stock App” automates all the tedious, error-prone manual processes associated with ordering, transferring, shipping, and replenishing consignment inventory. The module is designed for mobility, ensuring users high performance and real-time data access anywhere on any device. The Mobile Trunk Stock App can be deployed in the field on mobile devices, or in the office in a client/server model.
The Mobile Trunk Stock App provides visibility into and management of all consignment inventory, including leased and loaner inventory. The application seamlessly moves inventory from warehouse to consignment trunk stock location and creates neutral financial transactions for trunk stock sales orders.
Key Features of Strategic’s Mobile Trunk Stock App
Automate consignment replenishment:
The replacement order for the item being billed to the designated consignment location is created automatically.
During the billing process the user can identify if the inventory should be auto replaced. If auto replacement is selected, the module automatically creates the replenishment order for the proper consignment location.
Easily customize trunk stock shipment processing:
Ship consignment orders as normal shipments—no second process is needed.
The module processes receipts into representative/hospital locations for consignment sales orders only; it automatically creates the location if one does not exist.
Strategic’s Mobile Trunk Stock App is quick to implement, so you’ll be up and running, making the most of consignment inventory management in just days.
Talk to Strategic
If you’re interested in Strategic’s smart approach to consignment inventory management using our proprietary Mobile Trunk Stock App, connect with us today!