Inventory management for small business. A simple how to tutorial

if you run a small business you know exactly how time-consuming and expensive inventory management can be today I want to show you some of the technologies and techniques we use at our high-volume print shop to keep everything organized when I first started my business inventory management was one of our biggest headaches we were constantly thinking that we had items in stock that we didn't we were constantly making special runs to the store or making emergency phone calls to our suppliers because we just didn't know what we had on the production floor we needed to come up with technologies that were fast and efficient while some of the old inventory systems worked they were so cumbersome and because of the amount of packages we were receiving and sending everyday it wasn't really realistic to think with such a small staff that we would be able to implement them and actually keep them up to date so what we did is we started to look at ways we could integrate QR codes into our inventory system and how we could seamlessly manage our inventory so I'm going to show you two examples of exactly how we did this and I want to show you first the iPhone or the smartphone so this concept is pretty simple we have a QR code reader on the iPhone and then for each inventory item that we have around the shop we create a unique QR code that goes to a specific URL the URL then connects to our database and reads first of all how many items are in stock and then it brings up an interface that simply allows the user to change them so they could add one or subtract one the nice thing with this is that as the users or as people are working in the shop they can open up their iPhone application they can scan the inventory item they're working on and then they can quickly either deduct or add to the inventory so it's very very good at keeping it accurate and as you saw there that took me less than one second I didn't have to go back to a computer and the nice thing is is because most of the employees already have smartphones there's almost no energy on our site to integrate the technology they just connect to our Wi-Fi they can bring all this information up here and when you open the URL you get a lot more information that you could possibly get just by glancing at it while it's on the shelf the biggest issue that we found with using the smart phones is that when we started to scan a lot of inventory it started to get a little cumbersome because while it only does take a couple seconds each time when you multiply that out and you had 50 items or 20 items that you had to scan each one of these started to get a little time-consuming so I went to some of the big-box retailers like Home Depot and Nordstrom's and I noticed that they were using a device like this this is a linear profile they also make a linear profile and a version for the iPad what it is is a cradle for an iPhone or an iPad that lets you quickly scan inventory and let me just show you exactly how it works once this is open all I need to do is press this side button and now I'm able to scan inventory faster than I can type the information in and the other nice thing with this is it accepts a huge range of barcodes so the other thing that we did in our shop is that let's just pretend that we wanted to start selling Red Bull well the problem is is when the delivery driver keeps bringing us our cans of red ball I don't want to go and specifically stay stick a QR code on each one I could have the QR codes sitting on the rack where we load the the Red Bull up and each person could sort of add them add to the inventory as they load the boxes but an even simpler solution would be to associate the UPC code which is the unique barcode on the Red Bull cane to one of our unique QR codes so in the web interface what we've done is allowed you to enter a UPC code or a three of nine barcode and associate it with an individual inventory item so for example when I scan this red ball can it actually associates it with a QR code and then it brings up the inventory information for me and from here I can then add or subtract and apply it so now I don't need to rely on having stickers all over my office we can just use existing barcodes and QR codes and existing information that's on this can and a smartphone in a cradle to manage the whole system and not only that we can do it at a speed that it's faster to do to do the inventory system correctly than it is to ignore it it's you can receive ten items in less than a minute and there's no paperwork there's no extra processes or steps it's really about as efficient as we could possibly think I really don't know how this process could be made any faster so I don't want to go into how we program the web application because I don't think that's within the scope of this video what I really wanted to do was just introduce to you how you can start to make you our QR codes with unique URLs you can then match them to individual inventory items and you can start using your smartphones to start managing inventory and while there's going to be some cost on the development we're not talking huge amounts of money and it's relatively small amounts of data to be associated here there's lots of examples online of how to do this it gets very very easy to integrate a web application and then a QR code reader like this or a smartphone that has the capability of reading QR codes directly into your web interface and inventory management system make sure you subscribe to this channel we're going to be making a lot more videos about small business and inventory management we hope to see you soon

Channel: David Hay

Views: 546,004

Rating: 4.7487411 out of 5

Keywords: Barcode (Invention), QR Code (Invention), Inventory Management Software (Software Genre), inventory, managment, linea pro, linea pro 4, smartphone, barcode scanner, how to, INVENTORY MANAGMENT FOR SMALL BUSINESS

Id: fsPkrUfSi_c

Length: 5min 58sec (358 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 22 2015