Who doesn't know the typical phrases from the 90s à la "The profit lies in purchasing, and those who keep costs low are successful on the market."
Of course, you have to manage responsibly and invest budgets sustainably. Today, however, it is no longer just a matter of uncovering potential savings but rather sensibly investing budgets in order to increase productivity and profitability. This is also the case with software products such as an inventory app.
Free tools like Excel are often enough for certain tasks. But ask yourself if you´re using your working time effectively, or do you end up with a lot of manual work, bad processes and an unsatisfactory result for all parties involved? In this blog article, you'll learn about the 9 advantages that an inventory app offers compared to a manual inventory using an Excel spreadsheet.
With the smart seventhings asset manager, you always have a simple overview.
We all know the situation of having a lot of inventories with no overview of item condition and current location as well as information regarding whether an item is in use or currently available, when it was purchased and length of the warranty. So the first idea is to do the inventory with an Excel sheet recording all purchased inventory items one by one with respective important data.
Here, however, we encounter the first big problems relatively quickly:
(1) Which data do I have to sustainably maintain?
Manual data entry and management in Excel spreadsheets for inventory can be difficult. It often takes a long time to record detailed data, but recording less data may increase the risk of having to perform an inventory all over again.
Advantage inventory app: In a digital inventory app, all the important data parameters have already been predefined. All you have to do is fill out an input mask and you have already recorded all the relevant data. In addition, the detailed view of previously recorded items makes it much more convenient to maintain individual records.
Storing several identical or similar looking inventory items poses particular challenges leaving you to ask:
(2) How can I effectively tell items apart?
Using stickers with an individual identification number for each asset helps you to quickly and easily assign and record data to the corresponding inventory items.
When trying to maintain an overview using the Excel spreadsheet, errors and confusion often arise. While entering data, you may quickly find yourself in the wrong row or the wrong column, having overwritten data that should not have been overwritten.
Advantage inventory app: The smart inventory manager from seventhings provides you labels with your company logo, QR code and individual identification number ranges for free. All you need is your smartphone. Tag it! Scan it! Know it!
This leads us to problem number 3:
(3) Excel data maintenance is error-prone and can be overwritten quickly.
Who does not know it? You've been working on the inventory Excel table for 30 minutes and you get an error message - the program has crashed and your progress is gone. Or, you are briefly distracted and enter data in the wrong column - mistakes happen quickly and are above all human. That's why the Excel spreadsheet is not the best choice.
Advantage inventory app: Thanks to the facilitated input of data and history and the better overview, errors can be significantly reduced. Regularly saving data in the cloud also ensures that no work steps are lost unsaved. And if errors do occur, data can be easily restored from a backup.
In an Excel spreadsheet, the data can only be used in Excel, which leads us to problem number 4.
(4) Machine processing of the data is possible only to the smallest extent.
If data is consistently well maintained, experienced Excel professionals can do a lot with it. When the needs go beyond sums, averages, etc., things often become complex. As soon as a column or row is added, one quickly loses the overview.
Advantage inventory app: The seventhings Inventory Manager, provides a completely digital process - from the labels to the inventory app for scanning to the platform where all your data is recorded and displayed. This results in significantly more uses of well-structured data that you can process by machine. Interfaces for synchronizing with other tools such as DATEV, SAP or ERP systems massively increase clean data to make your work unimaginably easier. Such levels are far too complex, error-prone and inefficient for an Excel spreadsheet.
Visualize data manually? Not at seventhings - everything is digital.
(5) Collaborate across departments in Excel? Impossible.
Because the purchasing department often needs completely different data than IT administration or office management, it is absolutely logical that each department would have its own Excel spreadsheet.
Advantage inventory app: The seventhings Asset Manager enables users to create personalized dashboards providing them extensive filter options and the possibility to establish customized fields to record and display all the data they need. This solution provides two important advantages: clarity ensured by each user seeing only the data he or she needs and transparency through cross-departmental collaboration.
>>> Accessibility: why it's better to store data in a cloud.
(6) The excel sheet that grows with you?
The Excel table gets bigger and bigger until it eventually has thousands of rows and columns – storing huge amounts of data in a document. At some point, every Excel spreadsheet reaches its limits and chaos is inevitable. Everything takes forever and nobody can see through it anymore.
Advantage inventory app: The digital inventory is clear and scales with you. Thanks to simple sorting by locations and rooms, customized filters and individual dashboards, everything is easily kept in view – whether managing 1,000 or 25,000 inventory items - even if many employees are in the home office!
If you want to scale outward, you must also have structures that are capable of growth - read more about this in our Success Story with SO'USE.
(7) Inventory with printed excel tables & manual ticking off.
In many companies, an inventory goes something like this: Excel tables are printed out and distributed to the inventory assistants. They run through the entire office looking for the label, paralyzing the entire operation in the process. When all inventory items have been checked off by hand, the data is then transferred to the Excel list.
Advantage inventory app: Printed tables are a thing of the past. With our smartphone app for iOS and Android, you simply scan the label, update the data, and you've successfully inventoried the item. Done! This saves you reams of paper and a lot of time during the actual inventory process as well as during both preparation and follow-up. An inventory with the seventhings Asset Manager is much more sustainable and less time-consuming.
(8) fully updated overview, even over not physical present assets
When was this item last inventoried? What about the items that were not found during the inventory and are therefore missing? An excel spreadsheet leaves a lot of gaps in the data, which can hardly be maintained and which cannot be taken into account in an efficiently working company. A daily updated overview is unthinkable with an Excel spreadsheet.
Advantage inventory app: Thanks to locations and room assignments as well as the recording of handover to employees, the inventory app can eliminate many situations that lead to misplaced or lost items. This means you always have an overview of everything - every day - and are always up to date when superiors urgently need information.
>>> In our blog article ""What are the most important asset inventory processes?" you can learn about how much savings potential a digital inventory via inventory app really has.
(9) Become more sustainable with Excel spreadsheets?
One of the major challenges for companies is to operate more sustainably in the future. This is primarily related to the products and services that the company produces, but framework conditions such as electricity, consumables and inventory also play a major role. In order to have an influence on sustainable operation and production, you need complex data that is difficult to maintain and visualize in large quantities in Excel.
Advantage inventory app: The inventory app helps you to become more sustainable in many areas. You can make better purchasing decisions based on the data in a smart inventory manager. Is IT equipment really needed or is there still some that is in stock? Do new tables need to be purchased, or are there still some at the other location that are unused? Which machines are more prone to maintenance? You can find the answers to all of these questions in the inventory manager. At seventhings, we also want to help companies get started in the circular economy making it easier for you to pass on inventory items that you no longer need instead of disposing of them.
>>> You can find out how in our blog article "How companies can get started in the circular economy".
As you can see, the advantages of digital inventory managers like seventhings cannot be denied. Once you start using our digital solution, you’ll never go back. Our inventory app not only frees up your time, but also reduces your stress levels because you have so much less to think about. Digital processes that you can implement via the inventory app are less prone to errors and can significantly reduce the workload, leaving you much more capacity to take care of other important issues.
So what are you waiting for?