Are you looking for inventory management with barcode scanners? There are heaps of benefits to barcode scanning that can help your business do things faster and with more accuracy.
On the flip side, there are also set-up costs that you don’t get with other inventory systems. So, this article will cover the benefits and the differences between barcode inventory and non-barcode systems.
Barcode vs non-barcode inventory systems
Not all systems need barcoding, and the set-up costs might not be worth it for your business. You need equipment, scanners, printers, barcode generators and unique SKUs for every single stock item to get started.
While a lot of people think of barcoding when they hear inventory management, the two aren’t synonymous. There are lots of inventory management systems that don’t use barcoding but let users manually update stock usage and movement. These systems need a lot less set-up and so can be cheaper to operate.
With that being said, there are benefits to barcoding that can outweigh the costs. Here are the top ways barcoding in inventory management could help your business.
Limit screen time for your team
Sometimes it can feel like your paying your team to do the work, then twice as long to report on what they’ve done. Admin time is crucial and can give you powerful insights that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise and can save you time and money overall. However, admin tasks take your team away from work that makes money, so the faster you can get these tasks done the better.
Barcoding systems can help you achieve this. With barcode scanners, your team can quickly record stock usage or sales, drawing down from stock without even touching a keyboard. It saves your team heaps of time, but still means your records are kept up-to-date. Win-win.
Help get work done smoothly
Because barcode scanning systems help your team stay away from the keyboard, it can streamline the whole process. When your team has to break their workflow to input data, it can cause disruptions to their whole workflow. When you don’t create bottlenecks and distractions in this process, your team can complete work in a more focused way. With a barcode scanner, your team can quickly report what they are working on without getting distracted from it.
Process bulk quantities of stock easily
Moving away from the process improvements, there are loads of technical benefits that barcodes can have. It’s so much faster to process multiple items when you just need to scan them in. If your team is using or selling multiple stock items, the time saved can quickly add up between looking up each item or quickly scanning the items in. It means that you can fit more projects into a day… especially for warehouse staff who may have mountains of small products to check-in from unloading containers and carton deliveries.
Reduce human error
This is particularly the case when you have multiple products that have the same or similar descriptions and aren’t very visually distinct. For example, a business that sells plants that doesn’t use barcodes relies on the team member at the counter to identify each type of fern, potted plant and every planter! Bar codes mean that your team doesn’t need to have a perfect memory of every product to look it up.
Your team are much less likely to report usage of the wrong items or quantity. That’s good as mistakes like that can cause your reports to be drastically off from your true stock numbers.
Looking for barcode scanning solutions?
Rype can help you find and set-up the right solution for you, or assess whether it’s the right inventory style for you.
Grab some time to chat with our team by reaching out on the Contact Us page. We’ll have a chat with you about your business, what you’re looking to achieve and let you know how we can help. We work with heaps of software, including Unleashed, CIN7, WorkGuru and Dear.
Want to know more about Barcodes? Take a look at Unleashed’s Comprehensive Guide.
