2. Overview
 1. Social/Ethical Issue
 2. Background
 3. History
 4. Do Inventory Systems Really Work?

3. 1. Social/Ethical Issues
 Security: Anti-theft, RFID

4. 2. Background
 One of histories greatest logistical triumphs
 Having an effective, efficient inventory control system
is imperative to all retailers

5. Target

6. Lowe’s

7. Best Buy

8. Background
 Stock tens of thousands of items allover the world
 Helps retailers, such as Walmart, maintain “everyday
low prices”

9. Factors
 Quicker production cycles
 Proliferation of products
 Multi-national product contracts
 Makes inventory management a necessity!

10. Abilities
 Track sales and available inventory
 Communicate with suppliers (very quickly)
 Tell storeowners when to reorder and how much to
purchase

11. Background
 Pull together several technologies into one cohesive
approach

12. 3. History
 Stock tracking

13. The “Good” Old Days
 Write down purchases
 Looked at how many units were gone at the end of
the day
 Tried to forecast future needs….
 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

14. History
 Efficiency and mass production + Improved
customer service = the main goals of business
 A team at Harvard designs first modern check-out
system
 Able to generate billing records and manage
inventory
 Very expensive
 Version still used today in some stores

15. Background
 Still needed a better system
 Creation of modern bar-coding system
 Used ultraviolet light-sensitive ink and reader to mark
items for sale
 Lacked computing power needed to make it work

16. Background
 Lasers and Barcodes:
 Allowed smaller, faster and cheaper readers or
scanners
 Modern Barcode (UPC)
 ^ in computing power = ^ UPC improvement

17. Background
 Advances in computer and software technology =
better/improved inventory systems
 RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)
 Superior to barcodes. Why?
 Reads information from products from several yards
away
 Ability to encode more data
 Anti-theft

19. Do They Really Work?
 Essentially, the systems work like this:

20.  1. Barcodes or RFIDs tell scanners which items
consumers are buying

21.  2. Scanners transmit the information to computers
by reading the bar codes and sending that
information to the software

22.  3. Software interprets the numbers from the bar
code and matches them to the type of merchandise
it is

23.  4. Merchants are able to track sales and inventory

24. But, Do They Really
Work?
 Yes
 Benefits of modern inventory management systems:
 Great Advantages for any organization that manages
a supply chain for consumable items
 Allow merchants to track sales
 Merchants are able to buy a certain amount of “x”
good based on inventory management predictions
and records

25. Electronic Data
Interchange
 Used to communicate its needs for additional
merchandise to a vendor
 Process of sending and receiving data between two
parties

26. Ultimately….
 It comes down to the merchant, the system provides
good information to support decisions made by the
merchants
 Allows merchants such as….

27. KHARI

28. References
 Keifer and Khari, for allowing me to use his picture
 Web/Google: All images
 Howstuffworks.com, for information and some pics
 http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-inventory-
management-systems-work.htm
 http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-inventory-
management-systems-work1.htm
 http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-inventory-
management-systems-work2.htm