James Sauceda

Inventory Reconciliation

Introduction

BLAZE is a technology startup that creates software for cannabis businesses such as dispensaries and delivery services. They help people who grow cannabis, make cannabis-related products, distribute these products, and sell them to customers.

What is it? 🤔

What is Inventory Reconciliation?

Inventory Reconciliation is the process of matching stock records with what you physically have in your store. In addition to counting items and updating records, this whole process also allows you to find stock discrepancies, so you can address them

Why is it done? ✅️

Why do we care?

Having stock discrepancies can lead to issues affecting customers or compliance issues. Showing items that are in stock and not having items on hand can cause negative effects on the consumer. Reporting inaccurate quantities to state track-n-trace systems can be problematic if happened to be audited.

Research

We sat down with a Dispensary to break down their current shop’s Inventory Reconciliation process. 

We learned that management will print out their shop’s entire inventory and hand these pages to lower level employees, who are then assigned categories to count manually – by hand. This can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and rife with opportunities for human error.

Then, management inputs these numbers into their system one at a time, often into separate spreadsheets that they will compare with BLAZE and Compliance systems independently.

Finally, they investigate discrepancies by manually checking and adjusting records in multiple systems. This can take up to 6 hours.

The Approach

Printing paper like this is a waist – Lets design a simple mobile application to capture inventory quantities on the go. Lets use the camera or Bluetooth scanner to speed this process up.

Lets also make this collaborative, MGMT should be able to assign “counts” to employees.

On the backend – Lets pull in compliance data showing the difference between systems, eliminating the need to bounce back n forth.

Mobile Iterations

The mobile app should be simple

  • View the counts assigned to you
  • Scan and add counts quickly
Scan, enter qty – repeat.

Web Iterations

The desktop experience should be collaborative and resourceful.

Showing each employee count and allowing MGMT to choose between discrepancies

The Results

The mobile app never made it past wireframes – We’re hoping to have resources soon to pick up where we left off.

The Desktop app never made it either – Our research found that the majority of time spend dealing with inventory recons has a lot to do with syncing to compliance systems.

We pivoted slightly from helping customers with reconciliations to helping them with compliance system differences.

Next Steps

Finish iterating on mobile views to help employees count inventory faster.
Finish iterating desktop views to help admins organize and set up inventory reconciliations.

Build prototypes and test with actual users to get feedback on ux improvements.
And finally, unblock engineering with annotations and design system components.

Written by James Sauceda

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