Manna from heaven: Curing inventory headaches

EDMONTON, April 14 /Troy Media Corporation/ -- Trace Applications president Ted Power shared his client’s frustration with inventory control, but he had no solution that would help them ensure that the right amount of the right product actually arrived at the right destination at the right time.

No solution, that is, until he received a call from Perry Kinkaide, president of the Alberta Council of Technologies (ABCTech), who told him about an Alberta company called DBiTS.

“I’ve heard all of the nightmares,” Power said. “One of my clients in the shipping business sells small items such as fasteners and bolts: unfortunately their size makes it relatively easy to make counting mistakes. Managing their inventory is their biggest headache. But ensuring shipping orders are processed correctly is the lifeblood of their business.

“Their shipping mistakes are outrageous,” he added, but even with nightly meetings to discuss what went wrong, “they’re down to only a 40 per cent error rate.”

Unfortunately, a 40 per cent error rate is not unusual, he said, and not confined to a company on the verge of collapse. “They’ve been in business for 80 years and are quite successful. But when the people you trust to manage your inventory are the least educated and the lowest paid members of your staff, it’s hard to expect perfection.”

The labour shortage Alberta is currently experiencing is only adding to the difficulties, Power said. “It is becoming endemic that employers simply can’t find the bodies to staff their warehouses and shipping facilities. And without adequate and qualified staff, it is impossible to ensure accuracy in shipments” which, he added, makes it difficult to keep customers happy while continuing to turn a profit.

So that call from Perry Kinkaide proved to be manna from heaven.

Kinkaide had recently become the president of the board for a start-up called Database Information Technology Services, DBiTS for short. DBiTs was the brainchild of ex-Canadian military and dedicated Star Trek conventioneer Paul Carreau.

Carreau’s original idea for DBiTS, however, had nothing to do with inventory control. His idea was to use radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for conference and event management by tracking all registrations and creating usable and useful statistical databases.

But Kinkaide saw the inventory potential right away. If DBiTS can effectively manage and track people, why not inventory?

“Perry,” Power said, “told me ‘I think you’ll see you can use the product can be used quite effectively’. I agreed to meet with them, and discovered to my delight that we got along personally, intellectually, and conceptually.”

“With RFID tags on a given product (monitored by) a reader, comparing that information to a sales order for that product is easy,” he added, even for smaller products that are easy to misplace, lose track of, and under or overcount.

Using DBiTS, each unit is given a metal “target,” which is scannable with an electronic pulse. When “hit,” the information goes into an integrated chip, where the data can be monitored, confirmed and analyzed.

“You have no idea of the potential for this technology,” Power said. He has since met with his shipping client to explore the DBiTS solution and “the response has been very enthusiastic.”

“They said, ‘Ted, when can you get that here, and can it be sooner than that?’ I have a great number of clients who are not only very interested, but asking when they can buy it – and it hasn’t even been produced yet. You have no idea how badly this product is needed.”

But if there is such a large need, why doesn’t such a product currently exist?

“That was actually the very first question I asked,” David Swan, now Chief Technical Officer for DBiTS, said, recalling his first discussion with Paul Carreau over the concept.

“I guess it wasn’t attractive enough,” he said. “Programmers tend to think that way – who cares if it would make money, if it’s not interesting to me, I’m not on board.”

Swan, like Carreau a former member of the Canadian military, credits their shared “background training as generalists” in the military for wanting to find a technical solution to what was considered a less-than-sexy problem.

“This is on the verge of becoming a remarkable success story,” Kinkaide said. “Here you have a company that signed its first distributor before even going into production. It’s a brilliant solution to the problem of inventory control and it’s more reliable and can better manage inventory than anything I’ve seen.”

Even if that product wasn’t originally designed with inventory in mind.

Keywords: Trace Applications, Ted Powers, DBiTS, Alberta Council of Technologies, inventory, inventory management

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