Emad Hanna

If you meticulously organize your inventory storage and then rely on a spreadsheet or table-based system, your system of organization is not going to last. That's why it's critically important that whatever tool you use to track inventory reflects the way you've actually laid things out. The key for our customers is create a visual representation of locations like warehouses, rooms, closets, vehicles as well as parts of their process like assembly, QA, dispatch, etc. When everything is clearly laid out like this, the order and organization on which you initially spent your time and energy will be codified, preserved, and will become a tool you can leverage for true inventory VSIBILITY.

A poorly optimized warehouse is just a place to dump all your inventory. The only way to stay in control in a dynamic warehouse is to know not only what you have, but exactly where it is. If you use a FIFO/LIFO system, or if you care about expirations, then your warehouse layout has to be in harmony with how your items are moving. If you have different categories of inventory or if you break down inventory by customer, that needs to be represented as well. The tools that we provide at CyberStockroom are all about this kind of visibility: being able to see exactly where everything is in the warehouse and how it's moving around. You need 2 things for a successful warehouse: A great process, and technology to enable that process.

The simplest questions to ask are sometimes the most difficult ones to answer. When it comes to inventory analytics and auditing some key questions we focus on are: - HOW MANY of WHAT do we have WHERE (Too many businesses focus on the first 2 and forget the WHERE - location management is critical to tracking inventory properly). - WHO did WHAT with WHICH items WHEN (you need to be able to do this kind of detective work to find out exactly when items were moved, who moved them, and where they are now) At CyberStockroom we've built 2 robust solutions to answer these questions: The first is a visual inventory map to track items across all possible locations and the other is a fully searchable activity history for 'detective work'.

It's tempting for businesses to focus on tracking inventory across their supply chain while completely ignoring the inventory inside their own locations. We call this the 'Internal visibility problem'. Yes it's critical to track inventory coming from your vendors and leaving with your customers, but it's equally important to know what you have in your stockroom, your shelves, your closets, your trucks, etc. Inventory visibility means supply chain visibility + internal visibility. If you have one without the other, you don't have visibility.

We do a lot of discovery calls/demos with businesses looking to upgrade their inventory and one thing I've noticed is that people tend to overestimate how complicated barcode scanners are. If you're using something very basic like a wireless bluetooth scanner that pairs with your device, it behaves almost exactly like a keyboard that types the numbers quickly and presses Enter at the end. This means that anytime you see a textbox (or even in a spreadsheet or document) you can scan a code right in. There's no need to install any kind of plug in or to use any additional adaptors. Having said that, I completely agree with Vlad that barcoding is not always the way to go!

We've discovered that the key to tracking inventory is visibility and the most useful step you can take for your organization is to visually represent all your locations on a MAP. This can include physical places like buildings, rooms, shelves, bins, and trucks as well as virtual locations that correspond to different parts of your process (assembly, testing, QA, shipping, etc.). For our customers the visual inventory map is a game changer and everything else just feels like a glorified spreadsheet.