Custom Inventory Management System

Rewiring Inventory For an Eyewear Manufacturer
And Retailer

How replacing an overpriced SaaS inventory system with a custom, feature-rich IMS enabled a French eyewear manufacturer and retailer to double the RFID scanning speed and accelerate tag verification x3.

Industry:
Ecommerce

Enterprise Automation

Software Product Development

Data Visualization

Home / Operations Consulting

Business challenge

Retail companies know better than anyone that inventory is a part that can make or break your business’s success. Understocking at critical times and locations can lead to dissatisfied customers. Meanwhile, maintaining a large stockpile brings its own challenges, including storage and insurance costs, the hazards of spoilage, theft, and damage. The ability to strike the balance between having ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’ hinges on inventory management. That’s why it’s critical to take care of its accuracy, transparency, and sustainability.

However, despite the abundance and diversity of ready-made inventory products, finding the one that fits your budget and completely fits your needs is still tricky. For companies that strive for flexibility and full control over the inventory management system (IMS), custom software development is more likely to be the best bet.

Getting inventory in order was the ultimate goal of our client – a French eyewear manufacturer and retailer. It was their fourth project with *instinctools – our team had previously developed several applications for the client’s ecommerce ecosystem.

Their inventory processes were already automated and relied on barcode and RFID scanners, but the SaaS software the client used was costly and feature-limited, failing to cover the company’s operational needs.

Barcode scanners

are designed for line-of-sight scanning within one to two feet; they’re a go-to option for individual product locating and tracking.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) scanners

read data with in an up-to-20-feet range and can near-simultaneously scan multiple tags, but they lack accuracy compared to barcodes. They’re the perfect fit for large-scale tasks such as warehouse management.

As their unmet requirements for IMS functionality kept snowballing, the client faced a dilemma, whether to pour money into adding new features to their current system or invest in a custom solution.

To escape the vendor lock, they decided to opt for their own feature-rich software with unlimited scalability potential.

Solution

The client needed a device-agnostic solution that wouldn’t cost a fortune. Therefore, we went with the idea of a cross-platform app. As other client’s applications were already written in React Native, there were no doubts about the tech stack for the inventory software.

What challenges did our dedicated team face and overcome while crafting a powerful app that fully covered the client’s inventory-related workflows?

Stabilizing third-party libraries
and writing custom ones

Robust libraries are the backbone of smooth integration with barcode and RFID scanners. There are plenty of ready-made options.; However, you should have a seasoned development team able to spot the relevant ones, and write custom libraries to cover your specific inventory functionality.

To provide the client with a stable and easy-to-maintain solution, we followed four key principles when working with the libraries:

Avoiding a cumbersome collection of libraries

The more libraries you have, the more challenging it is to keep them up to date, resolve conflicts between them, and manage a diverse set of dependencies.

Preventing solution architecture complexity

Tight coupling of the software modules and dependency conflicts contribute to crafting a jerry-rigged solution with poor performance and excessive memory consumption.

Stabilizing third-party libraries

Ready-made options can bring critical bugs to the production code, or they may join the ranks of neglected libraries that are no longer supported. In both cases, fine-tuning is a must.

Striking the balance between third-party and custom libraries

Writing custom libraries takes way more time than calibrating the ready-made ones, so for the sake of development speed, it’s better to build them only for highly specific functionality not covered by the existing elements.

With the aforementioned points in mind, our team selected suitable open-source libraries for barcode scanners:

Capture JS for Socket Mobile
React Native BLE (react-native-ble-plx) for Netum

Capture JS is a stable library with detailed documentation, so it was ready to use right away, while React Native BLE was in beta and, therefore, required debugging and stabilization. Since open-source libraries provide full access to their code, *instinctools’ developers fixed it, honing performance and minimizing the overall risk of a third-party element adoption.

Meanwhile, integration with RFID scanners requires custom native libraries. For this purpose, our team utilized React Native Bridge, which works as a communication layer between native modules in Java and the client’s app in React Native with JavaScript code.

Incorporating tabletop RFID readers into the overall hardware ecosystem

Alongside handheld scanners, the client also has tabletop RFID readers. Those devices were much older than the rest of the client’s warehouse and in-store hardware.

Given their age, the tabletop RFID readers:

Lacked basic documentation
Worked with byte messages
Ran on a .NET library, while the rest of the client’s hardware used SDK libraries

The only artifact the client had for these readers was a configuration program. Due to this, *instinctools software engineers had to:

Decompile the configuration program
Investigate the code to understand the requests the program uses for communication with tabletop devices
Configure the same requests in JavaScript

These actions helped standardize the tech stack for all the client’s scanners.

Fighting for the app’s speed

The client wanted to seize RFID scanners’ ability to read large amounts of data and accelerate tag processing. The previous software could handle 300 tags/sec, while their RFID scanners could read 600 tags/sec. Given 15,000+ tagged items in each of the 24 eyewear boutiques across France and Belgium, the client wanted to leverage the scanners’ full capacity.

*Instinctools’ team selected asynchronous caching with scheduled cache refresh to scan the maximum number of tags per second without data streaming hiccups, rendering lags, and other performance glitches. Here’s how it works:

Thanks to using the native Java cache, the app can seamlessly handle 600 elements per second, which is twice the capacity of the client’s previous solution.

Besides doubling tag scanning speed, we’ve accelerated the tag validation process. Our team tripled the speed of data reconciliation between the back end and brick-and-mortar stores by taking advantage of native Java code.

Providing integration with RFID printers

The client decided to take the enhancement of their hardware ecosystem a step further and broaden it with RFID printers. This decision allowed the company to achieve independence from the suppliers of RFID tags and save on printing costs in the long run.

To ensure everything runs smoothly on the tech side, we designed the inventory app that could integrate seamlessly with various RFID printers, from Zebra and SATO to Toshiba, to name a few. That way, the client wasn’t limited in inventory equipment options and could print RFID tags entirely in-house.

Achieving inventory transparency with custom dashboards

Before cooperating with *instinctools, the client didn’t have any dashboards to track inventory levels and, therefore, lacked transparency and traceability of the relevant processes.

Ensuring data tells a clear story is one of our areas of expertise, so the dedicated team bolstered the app’s functionality with a data visualization feature.

Detailed view of a daily inventory state within a particular eyewear shop

On this tab, in-store admins can check the status of inventories conducted in their store:

In progress
Closed
Device issues

Validated
Missing

The staff can also see the number of expected, received, lost, and found back items, and inventory time.

Week or Semester view with inventory state over a longer period

This tab provides higher-level information about inventory status in weeks and months. Thanks to intuitive UI with color-coded table cells, it’s easy to spot inventories calling for detailed analysis:

Successful inventories with more than 95% of items scanned and validated by the system are green
Processes with device issues are orange
Procedures with unidentified items are red
Inventory-free days are gray

These custom dashboards provided the client with much-coveted traceability of inventory processes and empowered them to uncover and nip alarming issues in the bud.

Business value

Before

Overpriced inventory software under the vendor lock-in
Tabletop RFID readers run on legacy software
Inability to use the full capacity of RFID readers
Low tag validation speed
Lack of visibility into the inventory flow

After

The budget-friendly and flexible app is fully tailored to the client’s manufacturing and inventory workflows
Standardized and easy-to-maintain tech stack
Boosted RFID scanners’ reading capacity from 300 to 600 tags per second
x3 tag validation speed
Full transparency and traceability of inventory-related processes thanks to custom dashboards

Client’s testimonial

Here’s how the client’s product manager evaluates the outcomes of collaboration with *instinctools:

Intelligent Vending Software

BI SOFTWARE FOR A LARGE EUROPEAN VENDING MACHINE PROVIDER

How a company increased turnover by 9% by implementing BI and reducing the lost-sales rate.

Industry:
Retail, Manufacturing

Home / Operations Consulting

Business Challenge

Our client is a famous European retail company providing vending machines under various cooperation models, including selling, leasing, and more. As their business grew, they needed to increase their technological capabilities to make decisions faster, based on qualified data, and work even more effectively.

Our client’s existing solution didn’t meet these scalability and business efficiency requirements. Having more than 1000 vending machines operating across 50+ cities, they didn’t have a single point of truth and qualitative data for analysis, forecasting, and decision-making.

They needed their core units to be “on the same page” and wanted:

Decision-makers in Top management and Sales to have all company data at hand anytime with visualized information about vending machines operation, maintenance, and sales by region/country, including margin rates and issues reports.
Supply management and Machine Service employees to be aware of and timely respond to any technical issues, see relevant data to replenish stocks, and make purchases in a timely manner.

The current corporate solution needed significant functional improvements and technical gain as the client was committed to growing and scaling to new markets in Europe and United States. That’s why they addressed *instinctools for augmented technical expertise in business analysis, consulting, and business intelligence software development.

Solution

Step 1

Consulting and Discovery phase

No project starts without clearly defined terms of reference. To define them, we began by asking the right questions and answering the client’s questions.

After reaching a mutual understanding of problem definition, current system infrastructure analysis, processes evaluation, and project goals, we started to design and build solution architecture and prepare necessary documents for successful project implementation within the discussed timeline.

Step 2

Data warehouse creation and first dashboards release

Our data engineers organized proper ETL processes to connect data from corporate data sources (CRM, ERP, Excel files, and others) to a newly built data warehouse.

Even before the warehouse storage was fully organized with all company data, we crafted the first reports and dashboards based on newly gained data. Our client got the opportunity to evaluate the benefits of data visualization two weeks after the project started.

Receiving the feedback from dashboards’ actual users, we made timely and high-quality changes at the development stage.

Faster delivery and better development

High-quality changes based on the usage feedback

Continuous improvement

Step 3

Project release and data analysis

The core of delivering a quality product is understanding its users and their needs. The final step of our project was the review and BI software access distribution across the company according to its designated users.

More importantly, the established relationships between our development team, product stakeholders, and decision-makers allowed us to promptly react to the feedback and upcoming issues, making high-end improvements to the system.

Before

Disparate analysis and no single data storage solution
Existing software doesn’t allow for tracking sales margin across regions
Sales reports creation takes up to four working hours
Hard to estimate data quality
Stock management needs to be organized to provide more structured data
Not enough technical capabilities to make forecasts and intelligent data analytics

After

Data stored in one place opens up opportunities for complex analysis
Visible sales margin
Reports are generated automatically or created per request
High-quality data and transparency in operations
Stock managers get full control over stock turnover and timely purchases
Top managers use smart analytics daily to make data-driven decisions and predict sales

Key features

Flexibility

A user-friendly BI system allows configuring the necessary filters for data groups, defining data ranges, and displaying them on dashboards.

Scalability

The dashboards and datasets analytics can be scaled to be used in other units, e.g., Marketing, Accounting, Administration, and Operations.

Accessibility

Business intelligence software is accessible via mobile, web, tablet, and desktop devices.

Business Value

The client renegotiated low-margin contracts with customers
The number of lost sales was reduced by 30%.
Total turnover increased by 9% in 6 months.
The downtime of broken vending machines was reduced to a very minimum.

Multiplier Effect

The expertise employed in this project can be applied to similar projects in retail, hospitality, sharing economy fields, and others.

Custom OKR Application For a European Retailer With $700 Million Revenue

How switching from manual and time-consuming Google spreadsheets to a custom Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework empowered a retailer with 1,400+ stores in 12 countries to get a hassle-free and fully transparent OKR progress tracking, boosted staff engagement rate from 15% to 59%, and increased employee productivity by 33%.

Domain:
Management

Duration:
3 months

Home / Operations Consulting

Challenge

Setting goals and keeping employees in sync in terms of accomplishing them is essential for every company. That’s exactly what the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework is for. It helps employees to focus on a certain goal and measure the progress toward it.

Before turning to *instinctools, our customer had been using Google spreadsheets to track their OKR progress. However, it was a manual, time consuming, not-at-all engaging process that was difficult to manage and keep track of. As a result, teams used to lose interest in keeping the spreadsheets updated.

Having considered a bunch of out-of-the box solutions, the customer realized that it’s difficult to find “the one”, that would be a perfect fit for their business. Some lack certain features, others cost too much.

That’s why we suggested the most efficient option: to design a decent OKR app, which would help the company to accommodate all their needs and stay away from any problems the teams might face while setting and tracking OKRs.

Tasks

to let the employees know the business goals so that they can work together in achieving these goals
to enable the teams to integrate goals with everything they do and allow employees to align their individual achievements along with business success
to track the progress towards goals instantly to see if you are going in the right direction
to share the feedback on the goals and the process of achieving them

Solutions

We’ve developed a flexible product that offers a wide range of features, making the process of creating and tracking OKRs easier and faster.

quick and intuitive creation of objectives

possibility to assign users, add duration, description, and name for each OKR

setting the deadlines of objectives so that everyone can see them

grading the OKRs mid-term which helps to highlight areas where the team is falling behind so that appropriate measures can be taken

cascading OKR implementation with the possibility for individuals and teams to set their own goals and align them with company’s goals via measurable results

real-time dashboards to display the dynamics and monitor the progress of goals

charts that contain description for each task

graphs that show information about goal contributors

collecting and giving feedback to identify bottlenecks before they occur

integration with other communication and business apps – such as Gmail, Jira, etc. – to make updating the OKR progress hassle-free

Value

According to the customer, the implemented OKR application has become, abstractly speaking, a compass which shows what to focus on to help the team and company to be successful. Specifically, it resulted in:

being more effective and clear in setting goals
boosting engagement and empowerment through goal-setting
defining and measuring team performance against clear objectives
increasing transparency between management and teams and, thus, preventing ambiguity
creating a greater sense of shared accountability, transparency and purpose