Meet Henrik Nielsen, Resident Manager of Merry Water. Merry Water is the leading provider for water treatment, pumps and generators in Tanzania since 1989. It has 3 different product lines namely water treatment & purification, power generators and solar equipment. For handling their 7000+ items they use Exact Inventory Management.
We have been using it since 2006 now. Before that, it was rather chaos over here regarding inventory management. We did everything mostly by papers and decided it was time for a change. Through word of mouth we found out about Exact and we called them for a demo.
We already heard about the reputation of the company and knew some companies that were using Exact. Additionally the interface looked simple and easy to use, so we decided to go for Exact.
We use it for managing our stock. That means adding items to stock through purchase orders and issuing stock when we sell something, either through a job card, invoice or cash sale. We print our issue documents from the system on different color paper so it is very clear to whom it belongs. Currently about 10-12 people (out of 70) in the organization are using the software so you can say it is quite an essential system.
We have so much more control about our inventory. It gives us real time info about what we have in stock or not via a powerful search functionality. Since an item can have multiple article codes (for example the code our supplier uses and our own code) it is easy to get confused but with Exact you can search with any code you wish.
There are a few actually. One is the option to calculate the cost price of an item by adding the freight and clearing costs to the actual purchasing price which gives a more realistic picture than just the price of the supplier. Another one is the option to allocate serial numbers to individual items (e.g. generators) so we can easily track and trace machines if a customer has a complaint. Finally one feature that saves us a lot of time is the automatic ordering algorithm that suggests quantities of items to order based on actual stock levels and desired stock levels. The only thing I need to do is check and confirm the suggestion by the system!
