Christopher Williams

The choice of system in my opinion is all about ROI and accuracy. Manual systems come with their own headaches and inaccuracies. Hybrid systems are similar but take a good amount of physical labor and know how out of the equation. Paid for systems come with extensive training and know how to use them and usually have the biggest up front cost. I would say its mostly about volume, number of SKU's and your accuracy requirements/ability to do a full audit.

Barcode systems come in many flavors. You can pay for software or make something work for the time being with something like zapier and google sheets. While cost effective using this method comes with its own problems. You have to be 100% accurate when scanning and inputting data for instance. With more cost you can find a barcoded system and many website builders have some of this functionality built in these days so if you are selling online and in person you can take advantage of that software you are already using and paying for.

It's all about scale. I've mentioned before but for physical audits you can use kanban's to help monitor inventory. But if you have a small operation with very little movement you can use excel or google sheets to get the job done manually. Or just a clipboard and paper. You can scale this with the business by implementing barcodes and using something like zapier to pull the inventory on scan.

Other departments need some of your inventory. It's a fact of business. Marketing needs them for photos or product shoots. Sales needs them for demonstrations or to pull some information off of. The goal should be to make sure that you are not creating internal shrinkage and that everything is tracked and easy. A QR code for filling out a form on the door the marketing and sales teams use. A sign out sheet for this inventory with who and why. Any of these things helps make sure that this inventory is tracked.

You can make an easy daily or weekly audit by putting kanban's in place. A kanban is a visual signal or a visual representation that something needs to be done. Think of it like the tennis ball hanging from the garage, once it hits your windshield you know you need to stop. Using this for a visual audit of inventory can be powerful. One method that I have used is to get red and green tape. Lets assume this product is kept on a pallet against a wall. Tape the area where normal inventory would sit as green on the wall. Tape the area where its overstocked or understocked in red. During your walkthrough note every product that is outside the green zone. Those are the products that you are in danger of having too much of or to little of.

There have always been 3 main points I look for. Honesty, availability (both products and sales person), and quality product.