Countr : Automated inventory & waste management

There are a couple of core concepts as well as commonalities that came up when we began to consider our inventory management tool. Some were just logistics, like is a tablet durable enough to handle the day to day? There are tough cases for that. What happens in 0 connectivity environments, like walk-ins or freezers? Others were more esoteric, like how easy does it have to be, what do we do about human error, how do we account for user management?



With all that in mind we started with what we knew, like every store is unique, so we could only plan on basic truths, coolers/walk-ins keep things cold. Freezers keep things colder. Inventory moves at the speed of business, literally, like the number of let’s say burgers changes at the exact same frequency that you are making burgers. You get the idea.

So we took volatile items and recommended count times when they were less volatile. We added custom keyboards that were specific to the task at hand. We added inline calculation tools to help reduce human error. We created recommended travel paths to expedite the time spent in and out of closed areas. If we noticed counts in one area didn’t align with best practices we alerted the manager. We created a system that would reduce error as much as humanly possible.

We didn’t stop there though. We also wanted this to be the managers little red book of excellence, so we even included non inventory check lists to help ensure a smooth shift. We even threw in cross store gamification and leaderboards.