Recently someone asked for a recommendation on small business inventory management software for a catering business. If you’re a small business it makes relatively little difference what inventory management tools you use.
They’re all pretty much the same, and they are all doomed if you don’t take proper steps before you install one. Effective inventory management is much more about your physical environment and your physical process (and your inventory management strategy) than the software. This is true anytime you have a software system that depends on lots of human involvement for accuracy.
Almost any inventory management system you install is going to exact a heavy price in tagging, tracking, inventorying, etc. Unless you can plan and minimize the physical effort associated with these steps the system is going to fail. It doesn’t matter what it is.
The real danger with any inventory system is that you rely on it when it is wrong. So you have to make sure that whatever you use, it is very, very easy to keep it up to date and accurate. Especially if you have staff that will be required to use the system (whether they are tagging, using, checking in/out, etc.) the extra physical effort has to be as low as possible for it to work.
I would focus on making sure your physical environment is organized to support your inventory goals, and arranged such that you have quick visual cues if anything is out of whack. I’d try to work it out on paper first. Use stickers, note cards, pads, whatever you need, but work on the process until you are sure it is sound and has been reduced to the absolute minimum number of steps.
Then when you are ready to automate a good, sound process do not accept any system that adds more steps. This is really common sense, but it’s surprising how many people will blindly follow some byzantine process because it is engineered into a piece of software.
Often creating your own spreadsheet template will suffice. A spreadsheet can provide rudimentary database functions and should work fine as a simple inventory control system. If it doesn’t you can look to something like Microsoft Access for a simple database.
If you aren’t comfortable creating your own spreadsheet template you could get someone like this guy http://www.excelconsultant.net/ (note: I have no connection to this site) to write it for you once you have a good idea of what you need.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.