Managing Your Company's Inventory with QR Codes

Simplify inventory and asset tracking with mobile technology and QR codes.

It’s called mobile inventory management – scanning QR codes or barcodes with a mobile device to track retail transactions, what your company has in stock and more, which gives you a real-time snapshot of your assets that’s instant and accurate.

Today, businesses use QR code technology for accessing all sorts of information, from serial numbers and maintenance records on equipment to mapping assets with GPS tracking, from how-to instructions, travel schedules and background history to marketing and advertising – all in the name of streamlining the shopping and customer experience. Why? Well actually, the name says it all: “QR code” is short for “Quick Response Code,” a technology that allows businesses to respond quickly and nearly without question to all of their customers’ needs.

Every business has their own method to this madness, and typically, it goes like this:

Step 1 – Develop a list of assets, merchandise or other items to track, based on the main reason you’re using inventory management or asset tracking software: number of items, location of items at any given time, etc. The information in this list is used for your initial data entry.

Step 2 – Generate QR codes, produce them and attach them to the items you’re tracking. Once the QR code labels are connected to the merchandise or asset, it’s time to make an initial inventory count.

This is where PlaqueMaker can help

We can create for you long-lasting, durable, custom engraved QR code industrial asset tags using a number of materials including stainless steel, titanium, plastic, metal, aluminum, even leather. The image is also UV stable and resistant to fading. We also offer quantity discounts on custom tags.

Step 3 – Choose an appropriate inventory management and asset tracking software that records the current status of your inventory, reporting changes, additions, transactions, etc. Typically, the software knows what to encode into the QR code so the mobile app can read and process it, and the mobile app knows how to send the proper information back to the software application.

After deciding how to organize your inventory, creating a database, producing and attaching QR code labels and entering an initial inventory count, you are effectively using mobile inventory management. The initial investment of time and money will pay off, once your staff gets comfortable with this very powerful data retrieval system and they’re working with ease.