Inventory Shrink Loss Prevention

I was recently talking to a prospect about a common warehousing problem that’s encountered, inventory shrink due to spoilage.  A lot of inventory shrink caused by spoilage for both perishable and non-perishable goods could be avoided by regular checks of inventory to ensure that it hasn’t been exposed to adverse conditions such as excess moisture or heat.  Perishable goods will certainly require more frequent checks since they have a shelf life that is much shorter than a non-perishable good.  Non perishable goods are not immune to spoilage though. The effort to reduce this spoilage I will refer to as shrink loss prevention.

Unfortunately this is the type of task that has the potential to fall by the wayside without a centralized oversight that allows warehouse management personnel to understand which sections or racks haven’t been reviewed within a regular interval.  Inventory shrink loss prevention can be aided significantly by software solutions.

The prospect was looking for a solution that allowed them to view their warehouse floor plan with the associated racks on it that showed a red coloring on racks that hadn’t been check recently enough and a green rack if they had been check recently.  With a clear visual representation of overdue racks inventory shrink loss prevention becomes a much more manageable task. 

I’ve been itching for a chance to get some more practice with a modern front-end library like react.js and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to put together a proof of concept and get some practice at the same time.  Below is a video showing the proof of concept for shrink loss prevention. I recommend clicking the YouTube link to view the video on YouTube as it’s clearer there. 

Warehouse Inventory Loss Prevention and React.js

React was a perfect candidate for solving this type of business problem because of the heavy front-end requirements of mapping out a warehouse floor with editable components that will store data such as a last checked date.  This type of interaction is perfect for the strong points of react such as state management and a highly performant virtual DOM.  

This type of product would also likely only have a few screens with heavy front end interaction with the remainder of screen likely being tabular data for reporting or configuration.  This make it a great fit since react is relatively easy to incorporate selectively into an application as opposed to a more opinionated framework like Angular.