While the cosmetic industry may seem to be all glitz and glamour, the reality is that manufacturing these products can be extremely tedious. During manufacturing, key ingredients and parts can get misplaced easily which can lead to production inefficiencies, insufficient products, and disappointed customers. Each of these can greatly affect your business and finances, however, using an inventory management system can make each step simple and mistake-free.
Before we dive into the manufacturing process of cosmetics and how to simplify it, let’s take a look at exactly what constitutes cosmetics. Under the law, some of the products commonly referred to as "personal care products" are cosmetics. These include, for example, skin moisturizers, perfumes, lipsticks, fingernail polishes, eye and facial makeup preparations, shampoos, permanent waves, hair colors, toothpastes, and deodorants.
More than you expected? That is why it is so important to have a proper inventory system when dealing with such a wide variety of products.
Serial and Lot Numbers
When manufacturing cosmetic or “personal care” products, it is crucial to keep track of serial and lot numbers to ensure excellence with each unit. To ease the production process, a serial number may be assigned to each product unit from a single manufacturer. This identification number may be found on either the unit itself or the packaging.
Similarly, a lot number serves the same purpose, but for an entire batch of products rather than individual units. While serial numbers help track each component of a product to eliminate the risk of incorrect assembly, lot numbers help keep each shipment of products concise and tracked.
With the help of an electronic inventory management system like Order Time, you will be able to track all of your inventory across multiple warehouses and expedite the manufacturing process all together. This will aid in better serving customers by knowing exactly where your cosmetic products are at all times. Syncing this data in a cloud-based inventory platform gives immediate access and eliminates downtime throughout the entire process.
Expiration Dates
The cosmetic industry does pose a specific timeline as to when products must be consumed by, making it even more necessary to properly track all steps of the production process. With an all-in-one inventory management system, you will be given access to all important date-related data. This includes tracking all lot and serial numbers that have been purchased, received, used in production, and shipped to customers. Data like this makes it simple to find the exact component within a finished product.
Bundling
Once you have your cosmetic and personal care products manufactured, it is possible that your product may go out of stock. If this is the case, it is important to have a back-up plan so that you can still provide to your customer base. Order Time allows you to create bundles with just a few clicks. With a bundle, you’ll be able to dynamically replace an item with a substitute so that you can continue business and selling.
Styles and Labeling
With cosmetics it is likely you will offer multiple color and package size options, making it even more important to organize your product line during the manufacturing and selling process to reduce the risk of mistakes and miscalculations.
Order Time’s built-in Style Editor makes creating styles, variations, and item numbers effortless. This tool allows you to create all the attributes (i.e.: ‘Color’ or ‘Size’) for your cosmetic products in one place. Once you add in all applicable attributes, you can easily add them to orders and products to populate them with as many selections as you use. Order Time can even itemize and categorize each selection depending on the style given.
This itemized information can then be used to generate custom labels and barcodes. By doing this electronically, labels and barcodes can be continually updated based on available sizes and colors. An additional benefit of this is the ability to compare inventory levels with physical inventory count as well as the ability to facilitate sales and price checks.
With each of these features, Order Time provides the industry standard in order management in the cosmetic industry. To learn more, click here!
We're always adding new Features, so if you have one you can't live without, let us know using the Contact Us Form.For more information check out our Order Time Cheat Sheet.
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