Inventory Management System

Improving inventory categorisation to enable stock management at scale

A2C Remanufacturing

160 million laptops are manufactured every year. The mission of A2C, through their brand Circular Computing, is to remanufacture used laptops and re-sell them back into the market in nearly new condition.

They have been extremely successful and their company has grown quickly, especially during the period of Covid lockdown when demand for laptops increased significantly. With this growth comes technical challenges, this is where we were called to support their digital transformation.

Consultation (Analysis)

The first step was to analyse the existing business processes to highlight where the biggest opportunities for optimisation were and to note any risks that should be addressed.

We worked with the internal teams to map every department and each process, the time it takes, and data storage involved and any existing systems being used. This was an exhaustive exercise that left no stone unturned to make sure we had an accurate view.

Consultation
(Presenting Findings)

Once we had all the data, we were able to easily see which processes would benefit from implementing a technical solution to automate or semi-automate them. The data was broken down in different ways to show these opportunities by department and in relation to the systems being proposed. These included a Supplier Portal, Warehouse Management System and a Sales Portal.

Accompanying the data breakdown we presented an ROI (return on investment) calculation that demonstrated the amount of time each system would payback the full cost of creation/implementation through hard savings (reduced requirements for additional staff as the business continues to grow).

JDD were very professional and helped us to solve issues relating to CRM, ERP and Zebra Scanners.
We will definitely be using them again.

Andy Long

A2C Services

Inventory Processing

The first priority from the analysis output was to deliver a solution for semi-automating the categorisation of the thousands of inbound inventory items that can arrive into their business each day.

The inventory was being stored within Microsoft Dynamics so we created an system that integrates with the Microsoft API. Every inventory item that is imported to Dynamics is processed by the new system which allows administrators to align the attributes of the items and create categories to group them by. As the system processes each item it, creates artificial intelligence models of the administrators actions, and learns to automatically reconsile the inventory items into categories on it’s own.

Integration with the Microsoft Dynamics API

Artificial intelligence for automated processing of inventory

Inbound Stock Processing

After completing a second “deep dive” analysis of the warehouse processes we highlighted huge opportunities for optimisation of the warehouse stock processing, in particular the inbound order processing.

Based on these findings we developed an app for Zebra barcode scanners and rolled out the scanning of stock using the new technology across the inbound order processing team. The result was that previously manual processes of checking the inbound stock received against orders and pushing this information into Microsoft Dynamics were automated as the warehouse operatives scanned pallets and individual units of stock.

Technical partnership

We’ve continued to work with A2C past the completion of the initial project and support the ongoing needs of the systems.

Having our team available for development needs means they can focus on their core business activities.

Get In Touch

Whether you have a specific project in mind or would like to find out more about how we might be able to support your business, we'd love to talk.