It doesn’t matter if you have a 20,000-product warehouse or a fledgling e-commerce business looking to move onto bigger things, unless you manage your inventory efficiently, life will be difficult.
Keeping track of where everything is and how much you have of it is at the core of your business to make sure you don’t have massive overstocks or gaps in your inventory that mean you could be failing your customers.
Using QR code inventory management can be an easy way to get on top of a problematic area of your business, making life easier not only for you but for everyone who works for you as well. Here’s some reasons why you should introduce QR code inventory management to your business.
1. It’s easy to create your QR code database
One of the main reasons why you might not have taken this step before could be because you thought it would be time-consuming and difficult to set up, causing more problems than it could potentially solve. This may have been true in the past, but by sourcing the right QR code inventory management system, you can get started in minutes.
It can be as simple as using the smartphones or scanners that you already use in your business, and integrating QR codes that might already exist on product or material packaging. All this means that the barriers you may have seen as unsurmountable before are can easily be removed, especially with the right company for support.
2. The benefits of using QR codes for inventory
As you have now seen, it’s not a huge upheaval to move to a more effective system, but you may still be hazy on the benefits of a QR system over what you already have. First up, a QR system will typically save you time as all the details about a product or more importantly, a raw material, will be viewable just by scanning the code.
This is important to make sure that the right items are picked for production, rather than just relying on sight or experience to ensure accuracy when picking or kitting.
You can change product descriptions or details on a central system and these changes will come up when a code is scanned, which is much more time-efficient than having to relabel every item when a change is required.
3. You can use QR codes on almost anything
While the benefits for your stock are clear, so similar items aren’t confused with each other, QR codes can also be used to manage non-stock items. For instance, if a job requires expensive tools that you need to keep tabs on, you can use QR codes to scan them in and out and assign them to the person using them.
If they need to transfer the item to another employee during the course of the day, the new employee can simply scan the QR code to confirm that the tool is now being used by them. This way, it’s less likely to get lost and incur extra costs to your business.
To wrap everything up
Where once you may have thought that upgrading to use QR codes for inventory management would be costly and time-consuming, this is no longer the case. As well as being quick to implement, it can help with the efficiency of picking and supplying raw materials and can even be used to track tools and other expensive assets.
The key to putting this in place, though, is finding the right company to help you to implement it in your business, and making the right decision can move your business ahead of the competition.
Article and permission to publish here provided by Carol Trehearn. Originally written for Supply Chain Game Changer and published on April 17, 2024.
Cover image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay.