Simple Inventory Management and Product Logistics
SIMPL is a micro-SaaS application that is designed to improve the efficiency and maintainability of small and medium-sized businesses’ inventory and asset management capabilities. SIMPL does this by harnessing the power of Material UI, the Google Dart codebase, the Google Flutter framework, and the Google Firebase real-time database solution to provide a streamlined, simplistic, and elegant approach to inventory management and product logistics. Some primary use cases in which SIMPL excels is verifying and storing employee information, sharing databases between employees using invite-only security measures, generating QR codes for easy item tagging and tracking, scanning an item’s QR code to perform basic inventory tasks such as viewing item details, incrementing or decrementing item quantity, and building inventory reconciliation sheets. SIMPL also generates charts tracking item quantity over time, as well as store sales, so that users can make informed decisions about which products are high performers and which products simply cut into profit margins. Furthermore, SIMPL supports importing and exporting inventory data in CSV file format for further data manipulation in popular applications such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.
In many small and medium-sized companies, inventory management is a burdensome and tedious task. Because of their size, many of these companies are unable to afford many of the more prominent inventory management applications, like Cin7 and Zoho. Furthermore, they have no need for many of the features that these applications provide, such as ecommerce integration, aftership tracking, serial number tracking, etc. These business owners simply need a way to keep track of what is in stock, what isn’t, and which items are providing the most profit. I saw this first-hand at the company I interned with in Summer 2021. Inventory reconciliation was being done by hand with paper every day. Employees would physically count the items on the shelves and mark the totals on paper to compare with what the online inventory was showing. When I asked the store supervisor about the reasoning behind hand-counting inventory, she said that she was unable to find a suitable software solution. As I began to research this issue further, trying to see if I could find a software alternative, I also started reading articles about how the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had many reconsidering their job prospects, and how this was spurring the Great Resignation, which has led to an outgrowth of entrepreneurship and the creation of many small businesses. According to the Census Bureau, more than 4.4 million new businesses were created in the U.S. during 2020 alone. Pulling inspiration from my conversation with my supervisor, and the research I had done around inventory management software solutions, I saw a niche market and the idea of SIMPL was born. This new market of fledgling business owners and entrepreneurs has untapped potential in the realm of inventory management software, and SIMPL aims to be the answer.
SIMPL will provide a service that many small and medium-sized business owners will benefit greatly from, without having to rely on any outside partnerships or external relationships. Using QR code technology in conjunction with the SIMPL app on iPhones, Androids, or Web-based devices, businesses will be able to manage their inventory in a quick and cost-efficient manner. Because SIMPL is cross-platform, it will be able to quickly integrate into a company’s workflow regardless of whether they use Apple, Android, or the Web-based devices. Also, because of CSV export capabilities, inventory data obtained through SIMPL can be shared and further analyzed through other applications if the user chooses to do so. This makes SIMPL a great addon for businesses that already have some form of inventory management in place, while also providing a competitive alternative for those who are in the market for a completely new system. SIMPL was built predominantly for phones, because we wanted to provide a cost-efficient solution for companies that didn’t want to invest in barcode scanner hardware and software. Utilizing QR code technology, as opposed to conventional barcodes, information retention capacity is greatly increased, being that a QR code has up to up to a 30% error correction capability. This means that up to 30% of the QR code can be damaged, by fading, dirt, accidental marking, scuffs, etc. and SIMPL can still read the information stored in the code. As inventory is moved between locations and endures the wear and tear of retail, this will reduce the headache that comes with inventory becoming unscannable due to damage to the barcode. Additionally, due to the more compact form of QR codes, printing costs may be decreased by up to 25% in certain use cases. Concerning logistics, SIMPL is designed to simplify communication first and foremost. Users will be able to see who last interacted with any item currently in the database. They will also be able to quickly and easily share stores with other users. Along with customary item insertion and deletion, SIMPL is designed to store scan-in and scan-out data for each item, allowing the application to generate detailed graphs concerning item quantity over a period of hours, days, months, or a year. For each store, SIMPL will also highlight which items are low in stock and which items are most popular, which will aid the user in making informed decisions about what items to purchase in the future. SIMPL also features an inventory reconciliation scan option, which will allow the user to scan the product on the physical store shelves, export that data to a separate CSV, and then compare the Official Inventory CSV to the Inventory Reconciliation CSV in order to find discrepancies quickly.
Right now, our target market includes small to medium-sized retail companies, employing anywhere from 1 employee to 1000 employees, that either do not have an inventory management system in place, or would like to integrate a lightweight, cost-efficient addition into their current inventory management processes. With smaller businesses especially, there is a need to keep costs low. In doing so, more money can be put back into the business in the form of inventory and advertising, allowing the business to expand its profit margin and market presence. SIMPL is a solution for businesses who need inventory management and product logistics on a budget. As businesses reach those higher profit margins and bigger customer bases, inventory management becomes increasingly more important. Built with this in mind, SIMPL helps businesses establish a baseline for good inventory management practices early on, without divesting key funding that should be going to promote the business’s overall growth. We think that this affordability factor will be the main draw for customers who want to purchase and use the SIMPL software. Also, because of SIMPL’s availability on the major technology platforms (Web, Android, and iOS) we aim to be compatible with most, if not all, of the devices currently in use in our target market. Beyond our primary customer segment in retail , we would eventually like to bring SIMPL to small manufacturing companies and build a material requirement planning feature into the app, but that will depend on future development.
There are a few other inventory management apps currently in the market, but, to our knowledge, none provide cross-platform support, an updated UI built to Google Material UI standards, an inventory reconciliation feature, and other streamlined features built specific to small and medium-sized businesses at a competitive price point. Many full-fledged software solutions and competitors, like Cin7, Ordoro, and Webgility, suffer from feature bloat and contain many tools that starting entrepreneurs and business owners may not need. SIMPL challenges the assumption that all of these extra features are necessary for an efficient management solution. Our research showed that features that generated Bill of Materials, Manufacturing Orders, or Purchase Orders, or integrated Point of Sale systems, were often under-utilized by many smaller business customers. Many of these bigger software options also lacked mobile apps to serve in the place of scanning hardware. Concerning the lightweight app sphere, we found that current apps such as Sortly, TookStock, and Telesto were very uniform in function, and there was not much to differentiate between them. None of these apps allowed users to see change in quantity over time graphically. Sortly was the only application that allowed QR code scanning, while TookStock was the only app that offered a semblance of inventory reconciliation. SIMPL provides these niche features while also covering the standard basics of item cataloging, item insertion/deletion, store insertion/deletion, and store share features. There seems to be an assumption that these are the only features necessary for smaller business owners. However, the entrepreneurial spirit continues to expand as COVID-19 restrictions lift and people become increasingly more independent, and they are looking for smarter and better ways to work. These future innovators and business creators need a way to manage their inventory without getting bogged down in feature bloat while still being able to integrate newer inventory technologies like QR codes, and see data in a visual way with graphs and charts. Current options in the app market don’t provide all of these features in one package, and SIMPL can fill in that gap.
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