Every business owner knows that having control over your inventory is absolutely critical for the successful operation of your product and your finances. It’s the same with every business in any field or industry, having first-hand, immediate access over your asset management is one of the keys to maintaining maximum profitability.
Today’s fast-paced business climate demands that companies are always on the cutting edge when it comes to their systems and resources for efficiency. Asset management is no different. Knowing where any and every product can be found in your inventory requires having an asset tracking apparatus that offers a wealth of useful features and a simple user interface through which all of it can be accessed.
Portable devices have also become an integral part of our everyday lives and that includes the way we do business as well. Our smartphones and tablets have become so prevalent in the daily routines that we have turned to them as essential tools of just about every trade.
So when it comes to asset management and tracking, many successful companies are turning to those devices to get a handle on their inventory needs. Do a little research and you’ll find one inventory app after another, all of them offering a wide array of features and capabilities. But which is the right one for you and your business needs? That can be a tough nut to crack as there are so many out there from which to choose.
Tracking Down the Best Inventory App
There is an app for everything these days it seems but not all of them are built equally. Even more challenging is attempting to distinguish one from the other as to the level of functionality you might expect from the service you choose. The trick to finding the best inventory app is to start with identifying the essentials. What do you expect from your inventory app and how can it address the challenges that are facing your business with respect to asset management and tracking?
So as you start to do you research into which apps are best and which ones fail to make the cut, you may want to consider choosing the inventory app that does the basic stuff with exceptional simplicity and efficiency.
What does that mean exactly? It begins with ensuring that your inventory app can track your current inventory, provide you with accurate minimum and maximum counts, and provides detailed information on every item that is stored in your inventory. More important, those details should be customizable as to the amount of data that can be included.
Your app should also be able to provide you with a detailed account of expiration dates on product that has a limited shelf life as well as delineate between various aspects of your inventory. Sometimes a company has inventory that isn’t solely manufactured by the company but also includes supplies and other resources that have been purchased from vendors.
In many cases, these items are expendables that are used in the production of goods or the application of services which are the primary offering of the business. Your inventory app should also be able to give you a full accounting of the supplies and materials that have been purchased and track the materials that have been used on previous jobs or production phases.
Your inventory app must also incorporate full customization of every item in your inventory. That means having the ability to identify all of your supplies and assets through the use of descriptions, labels, and tags, but also utilizing work orders and lot or model numbers that are associated with the item. When you can add detailed labeling to the items in your inventory, your asset tracking capabilities are more effective and easier to use by all authorized parties.
Visual Aids
Descriptions are important and they can be very useful in helping you find the items you need in your inventory at a moment’s notice. But sometimes, the text is not always discernible and it can make distinguishing between one item and another somewhat tough to do.
So when you are considering getting an inventory app for your business, you should consider the one that has the additional feature of photo-based tracking. The visual representation of each item in the inventory can make what you are looking for easier to find. Instead of tracking down something with a name or a model number, you can be sure you’ve found the right item and you have all of the most accurate, up to date accounting of that item by having a photograph of that item right there in front of you as well. Alongside the descriptive text and labeling associated with it.
We’re not talking about one photograph either, but multiple photos that provide a full visual representation of the items in question. The more images you can include with your inventories, the more confident you can be about conducting your audits.
Tracking Your Inventory
Let’s talk tech for a second. The speed and versatility of your inventory app should always be a concern because conducting searches and audits require fact-based, up to the minute information. You need to see how much stock you have on hand and sometimes a company has multiple warehouses and holding facilities. You want to be able to access all of those locations at the same time.
One of the more efficient methods for doing just that is through the implementation of technologies that place an emphasis on using UPC’s or QR codes and barcodes. You don’t want to be typing numbers into a search bar, you should be able to simply scan one of these determiners and have all of the information called up immediately, with photographs to confirm what you are looking at is what you wanted to find.
This way you know that your inventory app is efficient and thorough and when time is money, it pays to have the information you need at your fingertips instantaneously. That’s what a good inventory app provides and the only question now is: can your company afford not to have one?
