How to track business inventory location? Cloud based, no POS, iOS.

October 21, 2013 1:52 PM

Trying to help a friend find a solution. They need a simplistic solution to tracking some office items. They have several demo kits (15) that their team uses. They need a way to see where each kit is at, without having to contact each employee that's out in the field to see who has what.

People are in an out of the office throughout the day/week, so it's hard for any one person to have a grasp. Some of the inventory is used in places where contacting the employee isn't allowed. It does need to be able to sync through the devices, so cloud/server of some sort.

The inventory is pretty constant, and they all eventually return back to the office, these aren't item that are being sold, and there is just one of each item.

Ideally, being able to "checkout" an item from the groups inventory, and then being able to update it's location: In Transit, Hospital, Clinic, University. Doesn't have to be GPS related, but a selectable preset or an updateable field.

What are some options here?

They all use iPhones and iPad's in the field. I could see an online spreadsheet working for this, but they'd really like an App instead of using Safari/Chrome.

Thanks! Let me know if more information would be helpful.

posted by peripatew to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

A lot of teams use Google Calendar or Exchange for this kind of thing. In the Exchange/Outlook world, treating the equipment as reserved conference rooms works well (a lot of places do this for portable projectors that get reserved and checked out), but you could also just have a single shared calendar and put in events that indicate when somebody has each piece of equipment. I'm sure there are more fit-to-purpose solutions, but everyone is reasonably familiar with calendars, so it might be to easiest way to get everyone on board fast.
posted by zachlipton at 1:59 PM on October 21, 2013

FileMaker Go would give you iOS-based access to an inventory database.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:39 PM on October 21, 2013

Since you and they are all using iDevices already - If you just need to know where things are try Tile

(I recently started using this for tracking business equipment and it works a treat)
posted by emjay at 3:50 PM on October 21, 2013

If you just need to know where things are try Tile

There is a limit of 10 Tile units per account. If you are sharing one account to manage 15 kits, then this will not work.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:58 PM on October 21, 2013