Looking for advice to getting a handle on our inventory, we do not have barcodes, or a computer friendly way of inventory, we are a 10000 case plus winery and we do have 3 different wine clubs. As of this point we have used wine direct for almost a year now and it seems whenever we do a wine club shipment our inventory is completely out. We have tried separating the wine club wine from the rest and inevitably it is a mess. At this point just looking for advice to make it manageable. Asking for a friend
Hi Todd,
The one thing I can say is that WineDirect is not a good fit for complex inventory strategies, so the more simple you can engineer the way you keep track of inventory, the better results you will have with WineDirect.
Could you maybe walk us through how you actually manage inventory now and when you see the physical numbers drift most from the WineDirect inventory?
We can get a good accurate count and keep it until we have a wine club release. After this evolution our numbers are way off. We have tried several remedies such as keeping the wine club wine separate from the other wine and have found that we then have a storage issue.
I agree that we want to keep it as simple as possible because it truly should be, we are just looking for ideas that other wineries are doing that would keep it simple.
We do a physical count at least every quarter with the hopes of increasing that to monthly, this takes man power so it is definitely something that we are working towards. Also getting a good consistent way of reconciling the wine club is a huge goal as well, trying to eliminate the storage issue that goes with that.
Thanks
Todd
Let’s start simply. Is this sorta/kinda what’s happening?
You create a new wine in WineDirect called 2017 Merlot and assign it 1,000 bottles of inventory.
You then process a Wine Club where each of your 500 members receives one bottle each of 2017 Merlot. The orders are complete and sent to fulfillment where bottles for shipment and pickups are physically reserved and set aside.
The remaining WineDirect inventory for 2017 Merlot should be 500 bottles.
But it’s not, in this scenario, what does your WineDirect inventory look like?
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