What is an Inventory Management System?

Let’s start from the beginning. An asset management software (also known as warehouse management system - WMS) is the process by which a company’s employees can track goods throughout its entire supply chain - from purchase to sale. It tells the amount and kind of inventory a company possesses. By analyzing this data you can see whether they are sufficient, too high in a way that it generates additional costs, or too low to meet customer demand.

Many of the traditional strategies for warehouse management have been digitized and can be developed into a successful and functioning application - this not only makes the job of managing inventory much simpler but can also help to provide metrics for all the data stored. More and more businesses are turning into automated inventory management systems to keep track of their stock and keep up with the demands of modern purchasing habits.

What are asset tracking systems for?

For those who want to refresh their memory on what asset tracking systems are for, here is a short explanation.

Asset management systems may apply to tangible assets such as buildings, company equipment, company cars, land, inventory, etc., or intangible assets such as a brand name, domain names, computerized databases, software, apps, websites, patented technologies, etc. There are many benefits of inventory control, some of them are:

• Tracking equipment and systems that belong to the company
• Controlling where the assets are placed and how they are used
• Monitoring the level of utilization, maximizing the value of assets
• Keeping an eye on the maintenance and efficient using the assets
• Monitoring the costs and ensuring the cost transparency
• Auditing compliance with the company policy
• Optimizing allocation of assets for a greater return on investment
• Supporting decision making through the transparency
• Auto stock refreshing, e.g. when a company is running of paper/ink etc., the system auto orders the needed equipment

This is just a little, but enough about the theory, let’s see some practice.

Here is the result of FM and Item Aware teams work.

How Freeport Metrics can help to create an asset tracking system

Identify the target users and their pain points. We began by first defining target users in various settings (warehouse, hospital, office building, manufacturing line, etc.) and identifying the pain points associated with existing solutions using design thinking techniques.

We observed that those responsible for tracking inventory were required to perform their tasks in many physical locations.  We identified that the existing solutions didn’t optimize for the mobility they needed and have come to expect from the software. We have seen outdated interfaces, poor usability, and complicated integration with other systems resulting in many workarounds and inefficiencies.

The next step - designing the WMS software that works both for desktop and mobile platforms

We moved to the design phase and created designs that could be extensible across both desktop and mobile platforms. The user-focused components, developed for iOS, Android, and web enables:

• multi-modal scanning (RFID, Barcode, Manual)
• sophisticated asset tracking and inventory scheduling
• dashboard analytics
• reporting and more

Workflow management, complete with task assignment, notifications & alerts ensures efficiency and transparency. While this is beneficial for those who are responsible for daily tracking, it also benefits managers who can track productivity and quickly identify issues.

Technology selection for developing asset tracking solution

Our development team worked with our clients guiding the software design and development for asset tracking systems based on the needs of our target customers. With our background in enterprise mobile development and cloud infrastructure, we’ve helped to iteratively develop many solutions of the Internet of Things (IoT), which we later applied in our software, such as the scalable Apache Flink-based processor, field data processing from antennas, and much more.

Conclusions

It’s important to automate inventory management systems in order to keep up with the demands of the ever-changing world. Digital asset management solutions ensure that a business can supervise their stock items and inventory efficiently.

Freeport Metrics development experts can automate inventory management for small businesses and large corporations, with a wide range of features to help keep track of stock from the manufacturer to the end-sale point. Some of the features WMS systems can include are hand-held scanners, barcode system for inventory management and even RFID devices which can automatically identify and track tagged objects electromagnetically.

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