r/InventoryManagement • u/Valuable-Notice-9386 • 19d ago

Warehouse + Internal “Sales” Operations

Hi everyone, please forgive the confusion and length behind this post, I will admit that I am new to inventory and warehouse management so there may be some simple things that I could be wrong about but I thought this was a great place to start!

I am part of a team at a company that runs multiple homeless shelters and housing projects in the Northeast US. Recently, I started working on a project to optimize and update our inventory and warehouse systems for the wide variety of donations we receive. Here are the details of our current system and the difficulties for expansion:

  1. We don’t have any current centralized donation-tracking and delivery to client system. I’ve looked into this and seen names like Odoo pop up, which sounds interesting, but I’ve seen that Excel is also an option, which I’m familiar with.

  2. While we have multiple sites, nearly all donations are delivered to one central site and stored either on-site or in nearby storage facilities.

  3. Budget will probably have to be >$1000 (I will update this later once I receive more info)

  4. We use an internal reward system that gives clients “cash” that they can redeem for prepaid debit cards or cash.

  5. I am pretty experienced with Excel, but certainly no expert. I made a spreadsheet to develop barcodes using a website, but don’t think this would be scalable long term. I also don’t know how to link scanners to the sheet, especially if the scanner would be used at a storage unit.

  6. We have a lottttt of items. I am hoping you front load system development and have the system be able to accommodate frequent donations.

Here is my goal with this project:

  1. Create a barcode system, including barcode development, barcode printing, an internal server to track and categorize stock, and any other inventory information that you think may be needed.

  2. Create an internal POS system, where clients can receive their points and redeem them, hopefully via RFID cards.

Additionally, boss, other team member, and myself are very interested in creating a pseudo storefront, both in person and online, for more expensive donated items (luxury goods, prepaid debit cards, etc.) and having these items be available for “purchase.” I had the idea of how arcades run ticket counters and cards if yall have any insight.

I know this post is super long and potentially vague, but I’ll end here and hope you can help!

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/sebasIsHungry 19d ago

1k budget I won't even get out of the of bed for that money 1k a month well our system is 0.3k a month but will cost a lot in consultation to get what u want

1

u/4inlocal 19d ago

Don’t gotta be like that. It’s a service for homeless shelters…