All You Need to Know About Mobile Inventory Management System

Quick Summary: Efficient management of your inventory will help you quickly mobilize your goods and track its movement, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and avoiding chaos. This is what you can achieve with a feature-rich mobile inventory management system. This complete guide provides all the information about it from key features to the development process, so stay tuned to be enlightened.

Sam used to lose his wristwatch often in his room. Annoyingly he would search for it all around - in the drawers, in the cupboard, beneath the bed, and everywhere, but get no sign of the item. Guess why? Because he belongs to the species that never organizes things, and their rooms remain untidy.

Now apply this situation to a business dealing with a large volume of products. How complicated and arduous it would be to manage and maintain a huge inventory of products. A single mistake can result in utter chaos in this situation.

Therefore, such a business requires lots of resources to manage and track its inventory. However, traditional methods of inventory management are inefficient and more susceptible to mistakes as the risk of human error looms over.

As a result, modern businesses leverage technology to streamline and automate their inventory management process. A mobile inventory management system is one of those methods that help businesses manage their inventory quickly and easily.

Businesses invest in mobile application development and set up databases to store the information about their stockpile to access the inventory details anytime. Tracking the arrival and departure of products becomes seamless because all data is available in a single place on the go.

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Let’s Get a Grasp of Mobile Inventory Management System

It’s a method of inventory management where smartphones and tablets are utilized to manage the level of stock, track input material, forecast demand, and more. Inventory management is crucial for an efficient supply chain.

The whole inventory management process includes several activities like warehousing, managing stock of raw materials and finished goods, transportation and logistics to move the goods from one place to another, etc.

A mobile inventory management system is an ecosystem of applications and IT technologies that offers an efficient and convenient way for inventory management. You can also integrate your inventory management mobile app with warehouse management software to get more control over the inventory from a single interface.

How Do Businesses Benefit from Mobile Inventory Management System?

Getting inventory details on demand is greatly helpful for businesses that provide them with real-time monitoring and control over their inventory. So, they are able to track and manage their stock from anywhere and anytime. With a mobile application, authorized personnel in the business can easily search and enter data to update inventory information.

With the inventory management solution leveraging a mobile app, information about the stock is visible across the warehouse. It can coordinate with the warehouse management system. But, what is warehouse management system? It’s a software platform that helps to track inventories at various locations and optimize warehouse operations. Moreover, it also provides better coordination among different inventory checkpoints.

A streamlined process of managing inventory will allow businesses to quickly process and dispatch goods, which will result in higher customer satisfaction and better services.

The following are the benefits of mobile inventory management system.

Stock Updates

A mobile-based inventory management system sends alerts in the case of low stock levels as it is monitored thoroughly. After this, fresh orders to purchase goods can be issued. Also, it is possible to set alerts that turns ON at a predetermined level of inventory. So, it’s helpful in maintaining a minimum level of inventory and avoiding possible crises.

Important Data

Inventory management apps provide a single interface to access diverse data like product status, shipment, order status, driver location, etc. Consequently, anyone in the inventory management loop can visualize the data to make appropriate decisions. Plus, this data is crucial for analyzing the situations within the process and passing on the correct information.

Inventory managers need reports that allow them to get updates in numbers. This data provides a picture of stock status to make decisions. Inventory managers get a myriad of information in numbers with these reports like purchases, turnover, reorders, shipping, and more. With this data, managers can build better strategies for their businesses.

Save Time

Setting up a hardware-based system to manage your inventory takes more time as you have to purchase compatible hardware and install software. Plus, your staff will require additional training to operate the system. Hence, it requires some time before it’s ready for managing the inventory.

Mobile is a common device that most people are aware of, therefore, your staff will require little or no training to operate the inventory management software. Hence, it will take much less time to start working with a mobile-based stock management system.

Ease of Access

Managing stock with traditional devices like computers or laptops is not always feasible because carrying them everywhere isn’t possible. However, mobile being a handheld device can be accessed anywhere. Further, smartphones and tablets can work on data connection, unlike laptops and desktops that require broadband connectivity. So, it’s more feasible to access inventory information on mobile devices.

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Key Features of Mobile Inventory Management Systems

The mobile-based inventory management offers numerous features that streamline the process of managing and controlling your inventory. Let’s check the key features of the system.

• Barcode: It automates and speeds up the data entry process and eliminates errors caused by human intervention.
• Reporting and Analytics: Data is critical to get the correct picture of businesses and a mobile app can bring that data directly into the hands of inventory managers. It provides reports and can be integrated with other data systems.
• Inventory Forecasting: A mobile inventory management system provides updates about the stock of goods allowing you to know which stock is full and which is getting empty.
• Security and Backup: Security and data backup are critical to ensure seamless functioning of an application. Mobile applications offer strong security layers that defend them from such threats. They also offer an easy way to back up your data that can be accessed if it’s lost.
• Alerts: Mobile apps can send alerts that provide important information to users. These alerts can be about orders, stock levels, and more.

Steps to Build a Mobile Inventory Management Application

Developing a mobile app is not a simple process and includes several steps from planning and conceptualization to testing and deployment. The following steps show the process of building a mobile inventory tracking system.

Planning

It is an essential step where important decisions like application architecture, features, type of app (like native, cross-platform, or hybrid), tech stack, etc., are taken. Further, your project requirements need to be documented and a roadmap has to be proposed for app development. It requires a good amount of research, brainstorming, and understanding of your business.

Experts you need for this step:

• Software Architect
• Project Manager
• Business Development Executive

Implementation

Now is the time to implement your idea based on the planning done in the first phase. Your mobile app is developed based on the preferred architecture and technology stack. The following will be the technologies based on the type of mobile app.

• Java or Kotlin to create native Android apps.
• Swift or Objective-C in the case of native iOS apps.
• Flutter, React Native, Xamarin, etc., for cross-platform apps.
• Ionic for hybrid apps.

Your mobile app backend comprises the server, APIs, and database. Popular databases for mobile apps include MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, and MongoDB. You should choose RESTful APIs as they are the standard APIs for software development today.

The server can be on-premises or cloud-based.

On-premises vs Cloud: Where to Get the Data of Your Mobile App?

To make sure that your mobile (application) inventory management system is functioning smoothly, you need a robust IT infrastructure. On-premises data centers lack flexibility and advanced technologies that can help businesses quickly scale and evolve to match contemporary business practices. Indeed, you will require additional hardware and software solutions to cope with the increasing load on your system that is not only costly but cumbersome too.

Cloud provides a better alternative to traditional IT infrastructures. It offers operational efficiency and the ecosystem of the latest tools and technologies. Plus, scalability becomes quite painless because you don’t have to invest in additional hardware and simply increase the resource availability on your cloud platform. Hence, instead of a traditional IT infrastructure, you can build a cloud-based mobile inventory management system.

You can choose a public cloud to host your app data. However, in the public cloud, multiple businesses share the same resources, and their data resides on the same platform but is isolated from one another. On the other hand, if you are reluctant to use this model, you can choose a private cloud (on-premises or third-party) to host your app more securely.

Today, most businesses prefer a combination of both types of cloud (public and private) for their applications, and it’s known as a hybrid cloud. With this approach, businesses shift their critical data to the private cloud and use the public cloud to leverage the cost benefits and flexibility it provides.

Testing and Deployment

Once the application is developed it needs to be tested thoroughly to remove errors and ensure it meets all the quality parameters. Therefore, checks are performed to make sure that the final product will behave in the expected manner. The app will be launched after testing is completed.

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Let’s Wrap UpManaging inventory is a complex process and the use of technology can take the most pain out of the job. Indeed, mobile-based inventory control software helps in tracking the inflow and outflow of goods, monitoring inventory levels, getting data and reports, as well as offering other functionalities.If you are considering creating an inventory management system with mobile access, then choosing the right technology partner to build your mobile app is critical to meeting those expectations. We, at Radixweb, offer end-to-end mobile app development services helping you from conceptualization to the development of next-gen mobile apps. We are experienced in developing mobile apps for enterprises, startups, and SMEs.