How to Easily Digitize Your Inventory Management and Tracking

Many businesses and organizations struggle with managing and tracking inventory manually, on paper, or with spreadsheets. These methods are often slow, inefficient, and error prone, which means you can end up with inaccurate inventory, where you’re unable to see what you have on hand, where it’s located, and manage it effectively. 

It can also take you hours or days to conduct inventory counts, and these methods typically aren’t able to keep up with growing inventory management needs, especially if the number of items you need to track increases significantly over time. 

Fortunately, there is an extremely easy and affordable way to fully digitize your inventory management and start tracking and managing it faster, more efficiently, and accurately. You can do this by implementing a simple solution called Scan IM Inventory Management.   

Digitizing Inventory Management with Scan IM 

Scan IM is an extremely simple and easy-to-use web-based application that allows you to quickly set up an inventory management system that’s 100% digital. 

You don’t have to buy an expensive warehouse management system or deal with a complicated installation or setup. You simply sign up, add team members and inventory locations, and start adding your inventory items by scanning their barcodes, bulk uploading them from a CSV spreadsheet file, or creating your own SKUs. 

You can verify, edit, or give each item a name and description, and you can also take a photo or upload a photo as a visual reference for each item. As you set up each item, you can also enter quantities and set minimum and maximum inventory levels, which will trigger alerts to notify you when an item reaches these thresholds. 

Once your inventory items are set up in Scan IM, you can start managing and tracking them by performing several types of transactions. These include: 

• Pull: choose an item and designate it for consumption or waste 
• Restock: add or remove inventory with a simple +/- to update your quantities 
• Transfer: move items between locations or rooms within your organization 
• Audit: audit inventory to ensure physical inventory matches the quantity in the app 

You can also search for inventory and quickly find items and locations by using a search bar that’s located on every screen and page of the Scan IM app. You can perform quick lookups by barcode, item description, or name, and you can also use the Scan IM cloud database to scan or search UPC barcodes. 

Scan IM also provides detailed inventory reports, so you can see stock status and quantities for every item, see consumption and usage, reorder and restock needs, and a complete archive and history of all items. You can also export your reports to PDFs or CSV files for sharing, archiving, and analysis. 

Ultimately, Scan IM gives you complete visibility into your inventory with updates that happen in real time based on every scan, update, and transaction you perform. You get all the tools you need to track every item, perform inventory transactions, and manage your inventory digitally—all in one place with a simple app that virtually anyone can easily learn. 

Scan IM is also far more affordable than most inventory management solutions, with simple monthly subscription plans to match the scale and needs of your organization. You can get started for as little as $159 per month and includes a risk-free 14-day trial with no credit card required. 

When you combine Scan IM with barcode scanners or run it on a touch mobile computer or tablet with built-in scanning capabilities, you can create a completely digital system to help you automate your inventory management process for better speed, efficiency, and accuracy. For the best results, we recommend using Scan IM with Zebra tablets or mobile computers, which are purpose-built for enterprise and industrial inventory management. Zebra’s devices provide the best combination of mobile performance, automated data capture and connectivity with durability that significantly lowers long-term cost of ownership. 

An Example of Scan IM in Action 

Organizations of virtually any type or size can potentially benefit from Scan IM’s digital inventory management, and a good case in point is The Grace Upon Grace Project (GUGP), a local non-profit in Loveland, Colorado. 

GUGP is dedicated to providing under-served families with necessary healthcare products such as diapers, wipes, and period products. Many of these items are too costly for families and individuals in need, so GUGP collects hundreds of donated items from local community members and stores and distributes them to community members in need. 

This humble initiative started small but quickly grew into a full-scale operation. Soon, the organization was receiving more donations and managing more items and quantities than it could count by hand and track with its original, spreadsheet-based system. 

Its processes were time-consuming and error-prone, and its volunteers were getting overwhelmed, especially on distribution days, when 150 families visit the GUGP warehouse each month to pick up their items during a one-hour time window. Everything had to be distributed, tracked and updated within that hour window, and there simply wasn’t enough time to do it all accurately and effectively with inventory spreadsheets. 

Fortunately, after discovering Scan IM as an inventory management solution, GUGP conducted a trial and replaced all its inventory spreadsheets with the Scan IM app and a paired Bluetooth scanner. On the next distribution day, everything was managed with Scan IM running on an Apple iPad. As inventory was pulled from the warehouse, volunteers scanned barcodes for those items and used Scan IM to update their inventory counts in real-time. 

This allowed volunteers to easily keep up with all the inventory transactions and update quantities as they worked through the line of 150 families picking up donated items. But GUGP still had a couple of remaining challenges. It needed to collect signatures from community members who were picking up the items, but it was cumbersome for volunteers to juggle a clipboard for signatures, an iPad for the Scan IM app, and a Bluetooth barcode scanner while managing so many pickups. 

So, GUGP switched to using a Zebra ET40 tablet to run the Scan IM app, scan barcodes, and also capture signatures digitally—all on one mobile device. This created a more streamlined experience for volunteers and made everything even faster and more efficient as they performed inventory transactions and updated quantities in real time. 

Ultimately, GUGP is now able to manage the distribution of as many as 9,000 donated items, all in one hour on one day each month, with digital efficiency and accuracy. But it can also perform warehouse inventory counts faster and more efficiently as well, which saves the organization hours of time each month. Most importantly, though, it allows the organization to serve the community better and make a real difference in people’s lives. 

Learn More and Demo Scan IM 

To learn more about Scan IM, Zebra mobile technologies, and arrange a demo, feel free to reach out to our inventory management experts at SK&T Integration. As specialists in digital inventory management, mobile computing, and automated data capture since 1997, we’re the developers of Scan IM, and we’d be glad to answer your questions and show you what our software can do for you. To get started, email us now or call us at 720-851-9108.