Problem
Managing serialised inventory with location-specific details is a significant challenge for large distributors, often leading to inaccurate inventory counts. This results in lost high-value sales opportunities and poor experiences for major customers purchasing large quantities of big-ticket items, and arranging contractors months in advance only to find their products are unavailable when needed.
Background info
Products are often produced or imported in batches with unique serial numbers (AKA dye lots), meaning they can’t always be mixed due to variations in colour, size, or thickness. Thus, your inventory may consist of many smaller lots that can’t be combined together to fill an order. You may not even know where it is. It could be scattered across various large warehouses, on the showroom floors, different racks, or not racket yet, in overstock areas, in transit, prepped for pickup, or long gone.
Causes
Inventory discrepancies can’t be controlled as they arise from multiple factors such as overbooking, unreported sample giveaways, unreceived supply chain transfers, returns, exchanges, breakages, or misplacement due to human error, lack of communication, negligence, laziness, ignorance or defiance of protocol and procedure, or even theft. Sometimes a whole skid can go missing leading to discrepancies involving thousands of products, compounded by long lead times from suppliers, strikes, weather, internal or external political factors.
Current solution: closed-door paper-based cycle count
Many companies rely on outdated, paper-based cycle counts, often closing retail stores or paying overtime to employees for manual inventory audits on holidays. These manual processes are prone to errors — incorrect SKU or serial entries, duplicate counts, lost notes — and require constant back-and-forth between store managers and system administrators.
New solution
To streamline the process, I designed a mobile-friendly web-app that enables on-demand, serialised, and location-specific inventory checks. Managers can set a specific product range and warehouse for audit when there’re large orders eliminating the need for store closures or overtime. That warehouse workers can then select products and serials from a dropdown, scan location barcode and input accurate quantity. They will also see live orders, known locations, and serial-specific packaging information for improved efficiency.
Managers can sort the counts by ID, SKU, Serial, Quantity, or Username, and see how long it took each employee to count each entry and when. If something doesn’t look right, they can highlight it in yellow and send it back for recounts. Once complete, they can update the inventory in their ERP system with a single click.
