The Past Present and Future of Technology Inventory Control - Essay Example

Inventory Control Devices Used In the Past, Present, and Future. Inventory control devices are important in tracking delivery of goods to customer especially in large organizations and warehouses (BarcodesInc 1). Rapid advances in inventory control have made it easy for many organizations. There are several inventory devices used in the past and the first era was zero generation. This generation included record managers like clay tablets, papyrus, and parchments and the information processing was manual.

The first generation of technology was the use of electro-magnetic computers, cardpunches, sorters, and tabulators that enabled large organizations to process a lot of record per day that would have been impossible with the manual technologies.Technology evolved to the second generation, which included electronic computers for scientific and numerical calculations. These computers were now convenient, reliable and could store much information. Standard packages emerged for inventory control applications, making it easy to sort, analyze, and process data.

The result was reduction in prices of goods and services leading to increased transactions and hence demanding more efficient and faster equipment. The third generation was online network databases that enabled online transaction processing (Gray 4). This era enabled a person to run many concurrent transactions and many users shared one database. Many programs developed in this era are still useful today in inventory control (Chief Supply Chain Officer Insights 13).The fourth generation inventory control devices were relational databases that enabled data definition, data navigation, and data manipulation (Gray 5).

It enabled the capturing of inputs and outputs of merchandise to the user device. The programs in this generation are convenient even in today’s life for client server computing. The devices that followed emerged in the year 1995 and were multimedia databases that still exist in today’s life (Gray 6). In complex objects, the database made it possible to search, compare, and manipulate the data. This database could store and retrieve information and it made inventory control easy by adding on time and time interval data types.

In the present, computer hardware has enabled the evolution of inventory control from manual and paper based processing to information search engines. The inventory control devices used in the present include barcode scanners to read every barcode in every item, mobile computers to capture data like the batch numbers and the inventory software for tracking the inventory sales (BarcodesInc 1). In addition, there are barcode printers for printing asset and shipping labels and barcode labels to label the stock in the warehouse.

The future of technology in inventory control devices is the automation of all the relationships including the production of new products in order to gain competitive advantage over other competitors, automated flow of information, automated supervision and control and supervision automated leads to increased employee productivity resulting to increased sales and hence a higher profit margin (Arter 1). Many companies are also opting to outsource of various services due to the high quality and less cost involved.

At the same time, outsourcing of services enables an organization to concentrate on the core business. Works CitedBarcodesInc. Inventory Control System. 2015. Web. 3rd March 2015.< http://www.barcodesinc.com/articles/inventory-control-system.htm> Chief Supply Chain Officer Insights. Five strategies for Improving Inventory Management across Supply Chain Networks. June 2011. Web. 3rd March 2015. Gray, Jim. Data Management: Past, Present, and Future. 1996. Web. 3 March 2015. < http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0701/0701156.pdf>