School districts have a great responsibility: providing students with the education they need to succeed. Teachers, administrative staff, janitors, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and maintenance staff work tirelessly to ensure students can thrive in the classroom. So why not equip our schools with technology that can make them more efficient and productive?
For more than 40 years, Oracle has helped education organizations around the world securely manage data and solve inventory challenges. Inventory management in schools has been a long-standing concern as different types of inventory make up a substantial portion of the district's assets and budgets. Oracle's Cloud ERP provides the framework for school systems to apply practical business applications to their operations.
There are several components to an Oracle inventory management system including tracking assets and inventory management. Using an ERP in conjunction with a cloud based inventory management system like RF-SMART allows school districts to perform those activities in real time, eliminate manual data entry, and enhance the ROI of your Oracle Cloud investment by 30-50%.
There are many applications for mobile inventory management in school districts. Here are some examples of ways technology can transform inventory in the education system:
Inventory Management
Often, school districts have a central warehouse where numerous inventory transactions occur. Receiving purchase orders from suppliers, the cycle counting process, or executing pick slips for replenishing schools with supplies are all activities that can be easily performed through the use of barcode scanning.
Mobile inventory capabilities can reach beyond the warehouse and into the classroom. When a food order arrives at a cafeteria, a receipt can easily be generated and users can use the camera on the mobile device to capture a photo of the supplier's packing slip to attach to the receipt in Oracle. When the art department needs to re-order painting supplies, they can use a mobile device to scan the barcode on the packaging of that supply to create a purchase requisition right away.
Fixed Asset Tracking
Maintaining accuracy of your fixed financial assets in Oracle Financials Cloud is imperative for your accounting and finance team’s objectives and budgets. School districts need to be able to receive, tag, and track assets from order to delivery. Mobile Fixed Assets can assist schools with the tracking and counting of valuable assets such as desks, computers, or smart technology.
The typical way of managing assets manually with pen/paper or spreadsheets can be a slow, time-consuming, and often inaccurate process. Leveraging Fixed Asset Tracking can drastically reduce the amount of time needed to perform a physical inventory by scanning a barcode to validate tag IDs and automatically uploading that count data back to Oracle. Counts can also be performed offline and then automatically uploaded to Oracle once completed and the device is back in range to keep your operations moving.
Maintenance
One of the largest controllable costs is in preventative and timely maintenance operations. Setting up operational assets in Oracle can give you visibility into maintenance schedules and the costs associated with maintaining those assets over time. Mobile inventory gives users the ability to perform certain maintenance activities directly from their device.
One maintenance activity that's easily done from a mobile devices is executing a maintenance work order. This could be a preventative work order created to service a vehicle or a corrective work order to repair a water leak at a school. Users can issue materials and even assign labor or equipment resources in real-time directly from a mobile handheld. Users can also create maintenance work orders by indicating the asset number and putting in a note describing the problem. From there, a proper work definition and dispatching can be done in Oracle to make sure the service tech knows what is needed.
Another feature of mobile maintenance management is the ability to perform meter readings from a mobile device. A good example of this could be checking the odometers on a fleet of vehicles. Once the field is updated in Oracle, it could trigger a maintenance work order for changing the oil or rotating tires. RF-SMART allows for the automation of maintenance tasks, ensures timely work completion, and improves visibility into open and closed Work Orders.
Mobile Delivery
In addition to functionality that instantly reflects transactions in Oracle, mobile inventory management provides chain of custody capabilities that stretch beyond order-based transactions. Mobile Delivery allows you to make sure a FedEx package makes its way to a classroom. It could give you traceability into possession of student records, or it could simply provide a scanning mechanism when cleaning supplies get dropped off at the appropriate closet, closing the loop on the replenishment process.
Want to learn more about how RF-SMART can help your school district?
