Smarter Inventory Management for Remote Locations: Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind
From bumpers to knee caps, always have a handle on what’s on hand–and where
There are a lot of times when you have inventory in a location you don’t control. Maybe your inventory is on consignment; for example, medical device makers often keep inventory at hospitals (like joint replacements and pacemakers), but the hospital only buys the device when it’s going to be used. Or you are in charge of maintaining a healthy inventory at your customer’s manufacturing facility. Or your inventory lives with your salespeople outside your warehouse.
This puts a lot of very valuable inventory out of your direct control. While the people holding your inventory have some responsibility to protect and keep track of it, ultimately, that inventory is on your books. The challenge lies in maintaining accurate inventory management for hundreds or thousands of customers and potentially millions of items—without relying on manual counts and reconciliation.
How can you take some of the burden off customers, warehouse managers, and salespeople to keep track of things while still maintaining a reliable, auditable inventory?
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons/trackers and Luna XIO’s innovative Bluetooth-to-cloud protocol give you a simple, automated, cost-effective, and secure inventory management solution that works for your products regardless of their location. At a glance, you and the people holding your inventory can see what’s on hand. You can then reallocate inventory to where it’s needed when necessary, giving you unprecedented flexibility in your supply chain.
The challenge of managing inventory in remote locations
If your business relies on consignment or managed inventory models, you know the struggles well. Valuable inventory is stored outside your control, and it’s not practical to send someone to check inventory levels as often as needed. While customers and salespeople are expected to track inventory, their level of investment in accuracy rarely matches yours.
Effective inventory management requires real-time insight into what you have and where. It’s no good for there to be a hoard of artificial hips in one hospital while another is running low. And it can be a waste of time to send field salespeople from hospital to hospital to adjust inventory. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to send someone right to the hospital where there are too many hips to bring to the one running short instead of guessing?
There are ways to automate inventory tracking, but until recently, the solutions, like RFID tags, required expensive investments in reader hardware and the ability to install that hardware at a customer’s location. You might be able to give salespeople an RFID reader–still expensive–but getting a hospital to install reader infrastructure would be next to impossible.
So what’s needed is something
- small
- inexpensive
- doesn’t require installing costly infrastructure.
And that something is Bluetooth technology.
A simple and scalable solution for remote inventory management
Bluetooth-low-energy (BLE) tags are easy to deploy, inexpensive, and have long battery lives (they require such low amounts of power that ‘low-energy’ is right in the name!). Bluetooth is everywhere; it is already in place at hospitals, in barcode scanners and tablets, in salespeople’s mobile devices, etc.
Once set up–which can take just a few days–you can start receiving data right into your ERP system and have live inventory dashboards powering your inventory management system.
How it works
Getting started with Luna’s BLE-based inventory management solution is straightforward:
- Attach Luna-enabled BLE tags to your items.
- Download an app to an internet-connected tablet at your customer’s location or to an employee’s work-supplied device. These devices will automatically connect to the tags and start reporting data.
- Start receiving the data in real time from the cloud into your ERP system.
No pairing or extra effort from staff is required—everything works seamlessly right out of the box. Now, you and your customers or salespeople can see at a glance what inventory they have on hand. You can automate sending new inventory, know exactly where you have too much inventory, and relocate it.
Luna-enabled BLE tags work with any inventory you need to manage. From medical devices in hospitals to easily “lost” parts like catalytic converters at auto plants, a single, simple BLE tag and Luna is all it takes to get a better handle on your inventory management.
The Luna XIO system is secure and easy to use.
Luna’s groundbreaking technology uses BLE tags and secure data delivery over the Cloud to solve real-time tracking and inventory management issues. It uses well-established and reliable wireless technologies–WiFi and Bluetooth–that are everywhere. Luna works with all your existing infrastructure, so there is no expensive or time-consuming hardware installations to worry about.
And Luna is secure. You are in control of your data. It’s encrypted and sent to your systems in real-time for you to use however you need.
Get a demo and learn more.
