Demo: IMEI Scanning with Scan Reports

In this Feature Friday demo I show how you can create a Scan Report in WholeCell to audit the inventory on your Purchase Orders to make sure you're not missing any items from your vendor. Watch the recording to learn more.

Transcript:

We'll get started guys. Again, my name is Brennan. I'm one of the co-founders of WholeCell. And this is our feature Friday series where I give you a kind of brief overview of one of WholeCell's features. Today we're talking about IMEI scanning. And again, you can use the chat box to ask any questions.

So Ariel, Benji, as we go through let me know if you've got anything you want to know.

I like to start these out with what is WholeCell for anyone that's on the call that doesn't know what WholeCell is. WholeCell is a serialized inventory management system that my co-founder Harry and I have put together over the last three and a half years or so. And it's designed specifically for folks that are buying and selling used phones. From the outset it's serialized inventory so it works for phones, tablets, wearable devices. In the future it'll work for other electronics like laptops. You can do it right now but it's not the best experience. It's really built around businesses that buy and sell phones, and phones have kind of gone wild in the last few years so there are more and more businesses out there than ever doing that today.

And one of the things that we've added in the last year or so with WholeCell is the ability to take a serialized inventory management system and use it to put up your inventory on your ecommerce channel. So WholeCell now supports multi-channel e-commerce synchronization to platforms like Swappa, back market and soon to be eBay. And so you can use WholeCell to manage your inventory quantities that are listed on those platforms which I think a lot of people are excited about.

We're literally talking today about IMEI scanning and fulfillment, and so that'll be more in the demo, but that is one of the really unique things that WholeCell does that other inventory management systems can't really do because they're not serialized from the get-go.

And then I think the core thing that WholeCell does for if you've got a company with multiple employees is it's a web application, so you sign into it just like any other website and you can access it from anywhere in the world at any time. If you've got people working remotely they can all stay on the same page and put all of their information into to one piece of software on the web. So rather than a company that's using spreadsheets and they've got different spreadsheets in different places, WholeCell keeps everything in one place and keeps everybody on your team in sync.

So today specifically we're talking about these things that we call scan reports in WholeCell. And what scan reports do is they allow you to scan devices by the IMEI or the ID. IDs are something that WholeCell provides every specific item in your inventory that you put into WholeCell. You can use any barcode scanner, and it's a bummer that I don't have the video today, but I'd show you I've got a barcode scanner that I bought on Amazon for probably 15 bucks and I'm going to be using that for our demo today. So you can use any barcode scanner, wireless, wired, whatever. Or you can literally just type in the IMEIs into a scan report.

And what a scan report is basically is a table of inventory. And as you scan the items in that table you can, like physically in the world you're scanning devices that are represented in that table, they will highlight as green. And for anybody that's doing audits or picking, it's a really, really helpful feature to be able to see what you are scanning. So that's what scan reports do. Whenever you scan an item a timestamp is saved of that moment in time that the device was scanned and who it was scanned by, so you get a name and a time of who scanned it and when.

And what these are useful for is finding missing items that maybe your vendor sent you a purchase order but they left some items out, so you can go through and audit what you received and you can see if any are missing. And you can see if you received any extras in the batch as well. And then scan reports have the ability to be exported to a CSV so you can actually share that information, get it out of WholeCell and share it with your supplier or anybody on your team and use it that way. So that's what a scan report is.

They look kind of like that image in the previous slide but this is a specific screenshot of a scan report. And there are a few different views that I want to go through to tell you guys about on scan reports. So this view that we're looking at in the screenshot on my slide here is a group view, and it's kind of the traditional inventory view that you probably look at in any inventory system where you can see we've got iPhone 6s there, it's highlighted, we can see the quantity that have been scanned, how many are yet to be scanned, how many were total on this batch of inventory and what their status is. And so you can kind of see that highlight in that top row. So we scanned that single success already at the time of this screenshot. And you get kind of a neat progress bar at the top that shows how many you have scanned and how many are left to scan and the total.

So scan reports look like this in a grouped view. In an individual view instead of showing you the quantity scanned, every single row would represent an individual item which is kind of nice to be able to see the IMEIs and IDs of those items as well. And then as I mentioned before, you can export them to a CSV, and that's in an individual view as well. So you have a couple different ways to look at your inventory as you're scanning through it.

You can use scan reports, and this is another, this actually, this screenshot has an individual view which I was mentioning in the previous slide, and so you can kind of see in this view you've got each row represents an individual item and you can see its ID and its ESN there and then one of them has been scanned and you can see the time and date and who it was scanned by, it was scanned by me.

But where can you use scan reports? In WholeCell they're supported on purchase orders, so you can create a scan report from a purchase order and it brings over all the inventory that you're supposed to receive from your supplier. So that's basically you're using them for audits to make sure you received all the inventory and no extra and no missing. And then on sales orders you can create them as well, and we see folks use these oftentimes as a picking step. So when you've got a bunch of inventory that you're preparing to send out to a customer you want to make sure that your folks in the warehouse want to make sure that they've got all the inventory, they're not sending any extra, they're not missing any before they box up the devices and send them out. So you can use it as a picking step. That is a really helpful visual.

And now we're going to jump into a demo. Again, I wish I had my video to show you guys, but if you are interested in starting a trial of WholeCell you can use that link that I'm showing here. Anytime that you have any questions about WholeCell, Harry and I and our account manager Mike are happy to help you at that email so send us an email anytime.

I conveniently on my second tab here have a purchase order in WholeCell to show you guys a little demo of how these scan reports work. So this is a purchase order in WholeCell, it's currently showing in a grouped view. And just so you guys know, this grouped, individual thing is not specific only to scan reports. You can use the grouped and individual views of inventory all across WholeCell. So even on just this is a purchase order from obviously test supplier 2 here, and we're showing in a grouped view so you can kind of see the quantity of these different items. But if we wanted to switch to an individual it's as easy as hitting this click, now we can see the ESNs and the IDs of these individual items. And WholeCell even has kind of a neat stock levels view that I'll go over in another conversation sometime or another demo sometime soon.

But today we're talking about scan reports. So we're on this PO, and I mentioned you can create a scan report from a purchase order, so we're going to create a new scan report for this test PO, and it's as easy as that. We're going to call it webinar demo scan report. We'll save it. And now we're at the scan report screen where the default view is individual but we can also go over to grouped, and I'll kind of just show you one of each of these. So we're at a fresh scan report here and what I'm going to do is I'll leave it on the grouped view here. This is where I would have been clutch to have ...

Ariel asked a question. Can you show the workflow on how an IMEI would link to a sale through eBay, Swappa and back market? Ariel, if you want to get in touch with me after the demo you can go to the site and chat with me on live chat. I'd be happy to point you towards some of our articles that described how that works. I'll do some of those e-commerce demos in a future webinar and live demo; it's just not what I'm going to show today. So reach out to me afterwards, and I'll be happy to set you up with some of our documentation for those things.

For this scan report so we've got our cursor here in this scan bar. And what's cool about text inputs in WholeCell is that you can use anything to type into them, so I can just type in them with my keyboard here, but I've got a barcode scanner right in front of me and I've got some labels printed out on these devices, so I'm going to scan one of them. And you might hear the beep. So I just scanned an iPhone 8, and you can see it came up. My scanner put in the text the ESN and then hit enter automatically. And this is kind of the coolest part of this, is you get to see the iPhone 8 get scanned, it's now updated everything, our progress bar is showing one scanned, the iPhone 8 is highlighted, we now have scanned one on scan 0 because this purchase order only had one iPhone 8 on it, and the total is one.

And then if we pop over to the individual view, what's neat about this is if we scroll down and we can find that device, there it is. So there's that iPhone 8. It was scanned, we've got a timestamp of the scanning and it was scanned by me because I'm signed into this WholeCell account. And if you wanted to you could filter this or sort this table by either of the scanning columns. And we now see, yeah, so right at the top this iPhone 8 is scanned. And I've got one other device, I've got two here that I was going to scan to share with you guys, so let's put our cursor back in that scanning bar. And we're going to scan this iPhone 6s. And boom, now our iPhone 6s is scanned. And since we were sorting the table by the scanned at column, the iPhone 6s pops to the top because it just got scanned and the table got reloaded.

So now we've got two devices on this scan report that have been scanned. And as you guys can imagine you see that the cursor is still in this bar, so if you were going through a really, really fast workflow in a warehouse you'd be able to just scan, scan, scan, scan, scan and scan all the devices that came in this box from this supplier and very quickly see how many of them are left unscanned. And whenever you ... well, just for the sake of showing you how this looks, I'll type in some random IMEI that's definitely not on this scan report, and when we hit enter it'll say, "That wasn't found." So whenever you end up seeing red you know this device was an extra and it wasn't meant to be on this purchase order or this sales order if you're doing it on the sales order side.

So we've got our information here. For the sake of demo I'm going to download this as a CSV to kind of show you what the CSV looks like.

What if you scan ... so Benji asks, "What if you scan the same item multiple times?" Great question, Benji. Let's grab that ESN again, toss it in here and hit enter, and you get kind of a similar thing, but it tells you that it's already been scanned. So you get that. It doesn't change the scan report, it just tells you that that one has already gotten scanned. Which is cool, if somebody grabs the same phone and they're trying to update the scan report, if they grab the same phone thinking it was an extra and they maybe are off on their account this will help them see that no, you're still sitting at a scanned quantity of two and they get this message that it's already been scanned.

So I downloaded this CSV. Let's pop that open. CSVs are always in the individual view, and so you kind of get basically a recreation of that individual table that I was showing you guys earlier which shows that these two items here on the bottom they were both scanned by me, one was scanned at 12:10, one was scanned at 12:11.

And that's the core of scan reports, guys. I think they're one of these really cool features especially if you're a larger seller and you're selling wholesale, or if you're just selling e-commerce orders, it's a really good way to see if you've fulfilled the right devices on your e-commerce orders. And that's on the outgoing side, but on the incoming side if you're buying in bulk ever it's a really, really helpful thing to do to just have your team create a scan report for every purchase order, to just absolutely make sure that you've got what you expected from your suppliers. And so you can send them that CSV, it's a really easy way to communicate, "Hey, this is what we received. We literally have an export of the time and date that we scan these on receiving and we're missing these devices. Or we got these extra, and do you want us to send them back to you?"

So that's my whole demo, guys, for scan reports. If anybody's got any questions, toss them in the chat.

Benji asked, "Where do the reports live after they're created?" Benji, good question. So this report is living on the purchase order. So if we hop back to that purchase order, let's refresh the page, now we have a scan report that's in our sidebar here, our history sidebar, and we can go to it. So actually, Benji, you bring up a great point. Thanks for asking that question. The idea behind scan reports is you can have as many of them as you want on a purchase order or a sales order. So maybe you create one the day that the purchase order came in and then you create another one at some other point for another reason just to make sure, maybe you're auditing on different days. If you want to audit at different steps in time, you get this entire history of all the scan reports for a particular purchase order or sales order. So now if we want to we can hop back into the webinar demo scan order and it's right at the same place that we left it when we just left it a second ago.

Any other questions, guys? Well, if there are no other that I can demo, I'm just going to end on this slide, everyone. Thanks so much. Sorry, that the video didn't end up working, but really appreciate your time. And see you next Friday for another WholeCell feature Friday series. Take care.