INVENTORY MANAGEMENT DATABASE FOR SMALL-TO-MEDIUM BUSINESSES

What is Inventory Management?

Inventory management is a systematic approach to sourcing, storing, and selling inventory—both raw materials (components) and finished goods (products). In business terms, inventory management means the right stock, at the right levels, in the right place, at the right time, and at the right cost as well as price.
As a part of your supply chain, inventory management includes aspects such as controlling and overseeing purchases — from suppliers as well as customers — maintaining the storage of stock, controlling the amount of product for sale, and order fulfillment.
Naturally, your company’s precise inventory management meaning will vary based on the types of products you sell and the channels you sell them through. But as long as those basic ingredients are present, you’ll have a solid foundation to build upon.

Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) often use Excel, Google Sheets, or other manual tools to keep track of inventory databases and make decisions about ordering. However, knowing when to reorder, how much to order, where to store stock, and so on can quickly become a complicated process.

Our database solution will allow these companies to easily perform their main inventory management tasks.

Our solution

Our solution, dedicated to small and medium businesses, is based on the creation of an app they can access anywhere, with a form to fill in and that will store the entered data in a Firebase database when they submit it. With it, they will be able to Create, Read, Update, Delete data about their inventory (add new article, its references, the number of articles, its features, colors...).

If you want to learn more abour the Firebase database, you can watch this video from The Coding Train.

How can we do this?

To create your easy-to-do inventory management app, you first have to create a form on a simple Glitch page and then link it to a Firebase database.

Step 1: The form

As said, you can create a simple form with a Glitch page, with some HTML. Here is an example of the HTML Code:

Hereaftrer are the results:

Item code

Item Name

Item Weight (in kilos)

Size (L x W x H cm)

Item color

Item Production Country

production materials

Item Quantity Ordered

Description

Submit

Step 2: The Firebase database

Firebase will allow you to send and retrieve data from our client-side using a NoSQL database. Firebase is a commercial service (from Google), but it has a pretty decent free plan, more than enough for our small apps. You can create one here.
You first need to create a Firebase project and then link it to your web page. Firebase provides a handy setup to add to our web applications, it includes the link to a JS library to use Firebase as well as the configuration keys needed to access to our newly created database. You have to includ in script tags at the end of your html document its information, that should look like this:

Now that we have access to our Firebase project, we need to see 2 things:

To access our database, we just need this line: var database = firebase.database();
Firebase Database uses References to represent specific locations in our DB. References are used for reading or writing data.
For the next steps you need to read the documentation.Then all you need to do is organise your database to make sure it has a category for each type of information you want to store (Item code, name, description...) and make sure you write in your database each information you enter in your form.

You can also create another website where you will be able to select an item by its name or its code and find all informations about it.

That's it! Thank you!