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Inventory Control Case Study

Wasp Solution Heals Inventory Ills

Christa Ruber, supervisor of the Health Sciences Learning Center at Pensacola Junior College’s Warrington Campus, was getting a headache from the disorganized, decentralized collections of medical supplies and equipment used at the Florida college.

"There was no real method to any of this madness. There were supplies in each of the dozens of closets scattered around our campus. Instructors kept things they needed and wanted in their closets or offices, making it hard to know what we really had," she said. "We were constantly doing triage, trying to find things manually."

In addition, the college could not accurately determine the fee it should charge each of the 1000 students for their course lab supplies, Ruber said. While the college did not want to overcharge students, it ran the risk of undercharging - and losing money from its budget to compensate, she noted.

A New Practice

Realizing the strain this was taking on Pensacola Junior College's already tight budget, Ruber used her military experience to address the chaos. Initially, Ruber did a manual accounting of the supplies scattered around the campus, tallying more than 5,000 items in total. She input this information into Microsoft Excel. Immediately she realized there was unnecessary - and costly - product duplication.

While Excel was a great start and helped initially identify duplication, using it to manage the inventory was unwieldy, time-consuming and not 100% accurate, said Ruber.

"We knew there was something better out there. We just didn't know what it was," she recalled. "All we knew was we needed a centralized, easy-to-use solution for our inventory."

After hitting the Internet, Ruber checked out user feedback, spoke to several vendors' support departments and tested some developers' free trial offerings. Following her pilot programs, Ruber selected Wasp Barcode's InventoryControl Pro with a Wasp WDT3200 mobile computer because the solution was so intuitive, user-friendly and satisfied her need for inventory tracking, said Ruber.

"I'm really self-taught. If I can teach myself a program, then it's a good intuitive program," she noted. "The idea of being able to manage inventory in this manner is incredible. There's no way I'd go back to the Excel spreadsheet."

Healthy Outlook

Using Wasp InventoryControl, Ruber has a much better way to track supply items used for healthrelated programs on campus. Instead of 5,000 pieces of inventory scattered around campus, the department slashed inventory by 65%, and now stocks just 1,750 items in two centralized supply rooms - for both dollar and time savings, said Ruber.

Further, she can track the cost of each item in InventoryControl. By setting up each course as a customer, she can “pick” supplies for that course and keep track of the quantity and cost of supplies used in each course.

The college now knows how much it has spent on supplies such as gloves, needles and surgical tags, and can determine exactly how much each course used. This ensures that the college accurately charges appropriate student lab fees each semester.

Each year, Florida state auditors examine the college's expenditures. Recently, there has been an increased focus on student lab fees. Wasp InventoryControl will enable Pensacola Junior College to share real figures on inventory to justify its spending, she said.

"In the tight budget process that schools face, we need solid support and evidence to justify any request for expenditures in the annual budget," said Ruber. “To help with this process, Wasp's InventoryControl is priceless."

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