Inventory management for small business. A simple how to tutorial

Inventory management for small business is often an after thought. Find out why this critical step can save you some serious money and how you can implement the latest technologies for almost without a massive budget. This step by step guide shows you how we manage 1000's of SKU's everyday without any errors.

For more information visit
http://www.davidhay.org/qr-codes-quic...

Let’s get this out of the way: the subject I’m going to cover today is a polarizing one. Like with all topics, some people will be on the bandwagon, on the fence, or dragging their feet kicking and screaming; this particular subject attracts discussions of the kicking and screaming variety. I’m talking about QR codes. There are many who think that the QR code is dead, and they wouldn’t be wrong. We could write an entire blog post about why QR codes suck, but they’re still the fastest way to transmit large amounts of information. That’s what makes it such a great platform on which to base your asset management and inventory tracking.

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Closed Caption:

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 that are high-volume
print shop to keep everything organized
yeah
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 work they
were so cumbersome and because of the
amount of packages we were receiving and
sending every day 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 your 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 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 connect 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 are 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 side 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 smartphones 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 skin
each one of these started to get a
little time consuming so i went to some
of the big box retailers like her
depot and Nordstrom's and I noticed that
they were using a device like this
this is a linear pro fall they also make
a linear pro 5 and a version for the
ipad
what it is is a cradle for an iphone or
and I had 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 will accept 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 board
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
state stick a QR code on each one
I could have the qr-code sitting on the
rack where we load the the Red Bull up
in each person could sort of add the 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 can 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 3 of 9 barcode
and associate it with an individual
inventory item
so for example when I skin this red bull
can it actually associate that 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 that is to ignore it its you
can receive 10 items in less than a
minute and there's no paperwork there's
no extra processes are 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
that's within the scope of this video
what I really wanted to do was just
introduced to you how you can start to
make you are our QR codes with unique
URLs you can then match them to
individual inventory items and you can
start using your smartphone's 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 a 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 smart phone 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