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 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.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.
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.
The mobile app should be simple
The desktop experience should be collaborative and resourceful.
Showing each employee count and allowing MGMT to choose between discrepancies
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.
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.