NOTE: If you’d prefer to view this information as a blog post, check out this entry in our Five Apps blog.
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The management of your inventory should be tied directly to the flow of business, from the ground up. Luckily, plenty of tools are available that can help with this process. Some of them are even free and/or open source. Let’s take a look at five tools that can help you track and control your inventory so your business can be more effective, efficient, and easily managed.
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Photo: iStockphoto.com/foto-ruhrgebiet
Openbravo is one of the leading open source ERP tools available. Within Openbravo is a powerful inventory tool that keeps your product flowing and ties in directly to every aspect of your ERP solution.
OpenBravo lets you manage your vendors, track where the inventory moves (between warehouses and/or clients/customers), and much more. OpenBravo can even help you accelerate new product introduction.
vtiger is CRM software that includes a powerful inventory component designed to handle complete sales cycle management. Both pre- and post-sales activities are built into vtiger to help you better control and understand the flow of your product.
vtiger supports inventory management functions like price books, sales quotes, purchase orders, sales orders, and invoices.
PartKeepr is a niche tool for tracking and managing inventory of electronic components. It’s a much smaller tool and it doesn’t include a full CRM or ERP.
PartKeepr will do wonders for those who need to keep track of electronic parts. It’s simple to install (written in PHP 5.3 and JavaScript) and does make use of a database (MySQL).
inFlow is a bit different from the other options, in that it is a client-side only tool. There is no Web-based component, but there is a database. Even though it’s not a Web-based tool, inFlow can handle more than 10,000 pieces of inventory — all from a standard PC.
Other features include barcode scanner support, multiple units of measurement, multiple locations/sub-locations, and full product movement history. inFlow also lets you assemble products from bill of materials, take orders from customers, handle advanced workflow, and invoice via email.
ABC Inventory is a great inventory solution for small to midsize businesses. A free subset of the Almyta Control System, it’s a stand-alone solution that’s meant to take a single PC and turn it into your inventory station. (If you want to use multiple machines for inventory, you should migrate to the ACS solution.)
ABC comes with several modules that support a vast number of features, including multiple companies, multiple warehouses for a company, multiple currencies, currency rate auto-updates, screen and report customizations, multiple workstation configurations, multiple logos, and much more.
Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for TechRepublic, The New Stack, and Linux New Media. He's covered a variety of topics for over twenty years and is an avid promoter of open source. For more news about Jack Wallen, visit his website jackwallen.com.
