If you’re a small business, there’s a good chance you won’t have many maintenance workers or assets to maintain. Your costs are low and the number of parts you need to keep on hand are even lower. So low, in fact, you might not see the need to properly track your inventory. Having your spare parts on a shelf and crossing them off of a paper list when you use them is good enough, right?
Enhancing Your Inventory Management
Well, you might want to re-think that approach. While this is a simple method of tracking inventory, it’s not very robust, easy to track, or reliable. Reporting becomes difficult, as does recording costs in an efficient manner. And if you should ever forget to cross off a part in your inventory when you take something, you could find yourself without parts when you really need them.
One of the best ways to track your small inventory system is with barcodes. Barcodes link easily to your CMMS to track costs, allow for easy reporting, and give you accurate and up-to-date part counts. Not only will your operations be easier to track and more accurate, but you’ll be perfectly prepared for additional growth and part tracking. Having a barcode system will allow you to quickly and easily add new parts or part variants to your CMMS. Switching to a barcode scanning system while your inventory is small will also prevent the inevitable switch to barcode scanning down the line, when you’ll have to add hundreds or even thousands of codes from scratch all at the same time.
In addition to these fantastic inward-facing advantages, you’ll be more professional facing outwards, as well. Should current or potential customers ever want to stop by to see your maintenance operations at work, you’ll be able to instill confidence through your use of a quick and easy-to-track inventory system. Visitors will be struck by how organized and professional your business is, saving you the embarrassment of being unable to describe or quickly explain how you track your inventory.
Put Your CMMS to Work
Implementing a barcode system can be a chore in and of itself- unless you use a CMMS. MicroMain’s CMMS inventory tracking system makes adding parts easy, and allows you to quickly assign a name, description, location, cost, use case, part variation, picture, and barcode tracking number to all of your parts. Having all of your inventory management built into your CMMS saves you time and headaches that are otherwise easily avoidable. If you’d like to learn more about our inventory tracking system and how it integrates into our CMMS, schedule a free demo with us today!