What comes to your mind once you hear the word “inventory”? Something boring with a smell of worn-out things, endless lists and lots of numbers. Nevertheless, however unattractive it may sound, we cannot avoid the inventory. It helps the company’s responsible people to manage and track the availability, condition, and safety of the office supplies.
Just like any complex process, it is already automated in the modern world. How do many business owners act? They open a search engine, start looking for frequently used inventory management systems. The most popular ones are SalesForce integrations or various templates on Excel, Google Sheets. What problems may occur? The software used by other people may not be suitable for you.
Integrations with 1C are good if you constantly need to monitor incoming-outgoing goods or products. The companies involved in trade have that necessity. Often, business owners just want to be able to see the list of possessions available in the offices. Equipment list templates in Excel are good when all you need is to enumerate 10–20 items. But it may get harder if the company has several offices, the staff change their location, and their hardware and possessions move along with them respectively. Also, that may be due to staff turnover. Those are the cases when you don’t only have to keep an inventory log, but also to assign the responsible people for the data safety at the current moment. When there’s a need to change the owner or the location of an item, to check its condition and decide if it’s necessary to buy a new one, it makes the assigned people work hard. Occasionally, they use some desktop apps working with databases to solve those problems. However, such an option is quite expensive and hard to get any modifications.
Let’s make a list of the requirements to have a perfectly automated process of maintaining the inventory:
- ease of adding items;
- filtering feature: according to owners, location, condition;
- monitoring requests from employees on replacing some equipment;
- adapting data to get printed;
- being able to modify the data structure if necessary.
Look how one of the Ukrainian IT companies has achieved the desired effect. To provide proper control of the equipment, they created a table with data, which included inventory numbers, titles and types of facilities as well as their location.
Moreover, each employee was assigned as responsible for the things belonging to his/her workplace, like a computer, a monitor, a mouse, etc.
They created a form to get timely tech support. It requires to specify the employee who needs some help and the problem itself. All data from the form are displayed in the special table where tech support workers mark if the problem has been solved or not.
The Inventory template has been developed in our service and is available for public use in the Template Store.
Its major differences from the above-mentioned templates are fast and prompt filtering feature, view configuration and no need to give access permission to employees just to submit a request to tech support.
