This is a guide to inventory management in Appliance.io

The inventory system has many buttons and features that are not available to most users. This guide will not be able to cover all of the situations in that you may find these controls relevant. This guide is a short write-up of how inventory will be handled and by who. This guide will also discuss what a healthy inventory error rate percentage is.

The following User Roles will have access to inventory management controls in inventory:

Super Admin

Buyer

We recommend that one person have the sole responsibility for all items that come in(Buyer). They will also personally correct errors.

We also recommend another person have the sole responsibility for items going out(Scanner). This individual will not need special permissions and will be the “caboose” of inventory. They will personally interact with 99% of deliveries on their way out the door.

These two individuals will work in tandem to ensure an accurate inventory of appliances.

The Buyer as we will call them is the person serving the requested inventory and ordering from the manufacturers. This person will also use the various controls in inventory to make adjustments and correct errors before they reach the customer.

The Scanner as we will call him is responsible for scanning out all items for delivery. They will use the scan-out page and delivery routing to ensure accuracy before the delivery team takes over.

The various controls in inventory will make a lot of error correction very easy. We will not cover specific examples in this guide due to the variance in real-world mistakes. Please read our guide on inventory controls to better understand how each button or feature will help you manage inventory. (link here)

These two individuals will receive correspondence from other company employees in reference to various concerns with the inventory. When an error is found they must fix it as soon as possible. Leaving these mistakes for later creates additional mistakes down the road.

We at Appliance.io recommend that each company take part in an inventory count at least once per month. This can even be done one category at a time per week. The goal is to keep errors below 5%.

A company that delivers 500-700 appliances a week will create about 30-40 mistakes in inventory per week.

It is recommended that strict inventory counting procedures are implemented till the staff is capable of maintaining an error rate of less than 3%. This would be about 15-25 mistakes per week when delivering 500-700 appliances per week.

We believe the best-case scenario for inventory is an error rate of less than 2% and this would be in line with a natural human error percentage. Achieving this is not easy and will take months of practice.