Inventory Management System, is a system to store the detail data of your products, including current stock on hand. You can use an expensive and fancy ERP system to do that, or as simple as Microsoft Excel, which actually can do the job, if you really need just a simple spreadsheet just to keep track of the inventory.
Let’s think a bit more, imagine you have more than 1 show room, or retail shop front, and you need to let the sales assistant, or customer at every location to be able to get the stock QOH (Quantity on Hand) at finger tip; Some time, if you have really large amount of products’ variants, getting products’ information might be just as crucial as QOH.
On the market, you can easily get off the shelves product to achieve that, of course with a price, and usually can cost you an arm or leg.
We have a simpler solution here, let’s go low code and see what can be done.
So we've got a problem
Again, your stingy boss just promised you that, if you able to think of a solution for inventory management system, and provide instant information via mobile app, the money that saved from the expensive solutions will become your incentive! How good is that? (I am not sure how true can it be as well…)
Let’s nail down some basic requirement
- Storing the products’ information, with the QOH (Quantity on Hand)
- Generate QR Code for printing
- The QR Code is to enable the mobile app to scan, and reflect the production information and QOH
The data structure:
Take note of the status
- Available- The product is available for sell
- Not Available – The product is not available for sell, regardless of having enough QOH
Business Flow
We have 2 sections here
- Inventory Management System:
- A database to store the products’ information
- A database to provide QR Code based on record id
- A database to provide API End Point for mobile app to trigger
- Mobile App
- Scan the QR Code to get the record id
- Trigger the Inventory Management System REST API End Point using record id
- Get the product information and display on mobile app
Below is a simple flow chart to help you understand better.
Test Data
We will need some test data to start with
- Sample product data in CSV file format – download a sample from here.
The Solutions
There are many low code solutions able to fulfill above requirement. I will start with a few, and keep updating here with new solutions.
NocoDB
NocoDB is an advanced version of Excel, which definitely can do more when come to manage your customer data, and suitable for a team of personnel, and the best part, it is open source and free.
SeaTable
SeaTable is an advanced version of Excel, which definitely can do more when come to manage your customer data, and suitable for a team of personnel.
Retool x NocoDB
Retool as 1 of the leader in low code solution, recently just publish it low code mobile app builder for beta. The features and UI surprisingly easy to use, and able to complete our requirement with ease.
Retool x SeaTable
Retool as 1 of the leader in low code solution, recently just publish it low code mobile app builder for beta. The features and UI surprisingly easy to use, and able to complete our requirement with ease.
NocoBase (Work in progress)
It is not NocoDB, but also open source, and equally awesome! Moreover, it is designed by developer, for developer, which basically you just need to maintain your developer “sense” when creating application with NocoBase
