How Do You Manage Company Inventory When Employees Are Working From Home?

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that a company’s ability to go remote was critical to its survival and success in a modern economy. With a focus on employee safety in this new normal, businesses across a wide range of industries began taking their operations remote. The economy can stop for nothing, meaning corporate assets needed to make their way out of offices and into employees’ homes.

Laptops, printers, phones, and chairs — tens of thousands in corporate assets — needed to be accounted for and managed. Not in a central location, but across thousands of locations in the local area. Knowing assets’ precise location, on top of who it was assigned to, will change the way inventory is managed.

Corporate inventory management has changed in two significant ways:

1. Inventory will have a precise GPS location, and not rely solely on personnel that it’s assigned to. On top of someone signing out an item, the item’s GPS location provides heightened visibility and reduces the time it takes to account for a necessary asset. Corporate IT systems would have the capability of discovering the precise location of an asset at the push of a button.

2. Maintenance and delivery will be distributed. Instead of contacting IT or the repair department, an on-call maintenance team will meet at specific coordinates at the push of a button to provide on-site repairs or swap with a functioning alternative. Both consumable items like paper and toner, and durable items like monitors or computer peripherals, would drop-ship directly from distributors/wholesalers on a contractual basis.

Because servers are moving into the cloud, meetings are moving to Zoom, and staff are seeing equal or greater productivity from home, offices are becoming relics of an aging economy. SimplyRFID, a leader in the manufacturing of radio-frequency ID tracking systems, is moving all of its non-manufacturing roles off-site, affecting 50% of the company. Carl Brown, CEO of SimplyRFID, adds, “SimplyRFID will maintain our office, but it’s being reconfigured for corporate events — couches, a bar, karaoke machine. Maybe a few workstations, but we don’t foresee returning to the traditional office environment. Traditional roles will still be needed to maintain corporate manufacturing standards at the plant, but a new micro-distribution inventory system needs to evolve.”

Businesses need to be agile to thrive in a modern economy. Those that have shown their adaptability and continue to operate safely and effectively throughout the pandemic are thriving in spite of the overall state of the economy. As more businesses will begin to expand their options to include remote work and work from home, they will discover that effective inventory management is a key component to success.

As the nature of work evolves, the nature of accountability evolves with it.

SimplyRFID tracks millions of IT servers, laptops, military equipment, and corporate assets all over the world. Using a low-cost microchip that can be attached to nearly anything, SimplyRFID can easily monitor where they move.