How orders are placed with Crafty's inventory management technology

The inventory app automates ordering to stay in stock, maintain the right inventory levels, and ensure fresh product.

Since we launched Crafty, we dreamt of a world where our clients could run manage their stock rooms the same way that sophisticated supply chains manage their warehouse inventory levels. As commanded by Hall & Oates, we're makin' our dreams come true!

Having worked with Fortune 500 companies in solving their office pantry inventory problems, our co-founders decided to build our own inventory management software for office managers, as opposed to buying an off-the-shelf software.

The objective of our inventory management software is:

• Automate the ordering process for various locations within a client's office
• Hold tighter inventory levels in client spaces (to reduce waste!)
• Give direct line of sight to inventory levels

Automated Ordering

Say goodbye to spending hours each week placing orders.  Gone are the days when you need to take inventory, go online to place your orders, schedule your delivery, and receive, unbox, and put-away your delivery.  You're with Crafty now - we've got your back.

And we've got a great system for automating the ordering process:  the Inventory Center.

The Inventory Center is a digital catalogue of the products we are stocking in your space.  It virtualizes all of the different stocking locations, so that we can track the consumption of individual products in specific locations (by kitchen, floor, building, and city). 

When on-site, our Field Operations team inputs your inventory levels into our Crafty Operator App, and our inventory logic (pictured below) does the rest!  PS - we get into the math down below 🤓

For clients who were placing their own orders before working with Crafty, they've saved hours of time each day by empowering Crafty's Inventory Management technology.

Holding Tight Inventory Levels - let's get into the math 🤓

We now live in a world where we don't know how many people are coming into the office each day.  As a result, consumption is more volatile on a day-by-day basis than before.

Luckily, our Inventory Center uses a par level system with an "Order Up To Threshold" and a "Reorder Threshold" to react to the ebbs and flows of consumption within each sub-location of your office.  This helps us quickly refill products that are moving and avoid over-ordering products that are not moving.  After our team inputs inventory counts into our system, the system calculates the correct quantities to reorder based on these two elements:

1. The Order Up To Threshold is our ceiling.  It prevents us from over-ordering more product than we want to have in our space.  Often, it's a reflection of the amount of storage we have for that product, or it may just be a max level of how much we want to have in backstock.
2. The Reorder Threshold is our trigger for replenishment.  It is the point at which we will actually place another order.  Especially for slow moving products, we may not want to reorder them until they hit a certain level or run out entirely.  Our system will know not to reorder until that threshold is hit.

Want to see your Inventory Center?  Go into the My Products section and filter for a specific location.  All of the products you see for that single location are in that location's Inventory Center.

Line of Sight to Your Inventory Levels

The My Products section of your Crafty Platform will display the last 30 days of inventory counts and quantities delivered at the bottom of each product's page in the "Recent Activity" section, as seen here:

Also, the My Products section of the platform displays two important thresholds we use to maintain your inventory levels.

• Reorder Threshold - the Reorder Threshold is our trigger for replenishment.  It is the point at which we will actually place another order.  
• Reorder Up To Threshold - when we have triggered a reorder, the Reorder Up To Threshold is our ceiling of how much to order without over-ordering. 

You'll be able to see these thresholds for each product in your My Products section as seen below (highlighted in orange):

Every office has products that you should never run out of (e.g., coffee, paper towels). Our inventory logic ensures that we won't :)