While it may seem mundane to track office supplies within your facility, establishing an inventory and asset management system for office supplies can result in significant cost savings. As employees continue to return to the office and the hybrid workforce becomes the new standard, navigating supply management for employees can be difficult. By utilizing tools like enterprise asset management software, companies can establish a transparent, easy-to-use tracking system to ensure that supplies are monitored while reducing the need for constant reorders. Here, our team of facilities software engineers at SCLogic discusses the importance of tracking your office supplies and how Intra’s Asset Logistics Workgroup solves the asset management pain points FMs face daily. 

Is it Really Important to Track Office Supplies?

You’re probably wondering how important it is to track office supplies. I mean, computers and other expensive materials, sure, but what about pens, binders, and other utensils? Actually, it matters a lot. According to a study by Papermate, 75% of employees admitted to stealing office supplies. This may seem insignificant, but the economic damage of these thefts can be responsible for around 35% of an organization’s inventory shrinkage and 1.4% of its total revenue, all from office supply theft. 

While this behavior is not condoned, it is essential to note that one of the most common reasons for employee theft is disgruntled or unappreciated employees. If this is a frequent occurrence within your facility, you may want to take a step back and evaluate why this behavior keeps occurring. Additionally, tracking office supplies significantly increases your inventory accuracy, giving you the resources to have detailed oversight of your facility. According to Cision, when appropriately done, item-level tagging can increase inventory accuracy from 63% to 95%. Item-level tagging uses technology assistance such as RFID tags or barcodes, which we have significant experience with, to organize all assets within your facility.

What is the Best Process for Tracking Office Supplies?

When beginning tracking your office supplies, create an easily implementable strategy so that all involved employees feel confident in task completion. Begin by performing an asset audit of your current office supplies. Where are they located? Are there multiple locations? Who currently has access to these supplies? Where are there gaps in our recent reporting vs. audit reporting? Gathering a complete view of what you’re working with makes it easier to narrow down the solution you want to look for. This also helps you identify ghost assets or assets that may be unusable from breakage to increase accuracy in your inventory count.

After establishing the current state of your office supplies, develop a plan and implement a software-driven solution, such as Intra, to assist your team. So how does Intra help with office supply tracking? Let us break it down for you:

Configurable Lists for Asset Management

Straightforward and created for accuracy, Intra allows office supplies to be tracked by manually entering items through lists or using technology such as RFID tags or barcodes for quick entry. This is especially helpful for businesses with multiple office supply closets so that each list can be customized. Not only does Intra manage asset location, but it holds information like price, supplier, and for a technology-based asset, lifecycle management.

Assigned Tasks for Office Supply Management

For those within the FM department, office supply management may just be done by the person there on any given day. Unfortunately, this can result in a greater chance for human error, as changes that occurred during another employee’s shift may not have been recorded. Using Intra, you can assign audit tasks to specific employees, even on a set schedule to ensure that office supply audits are completed frequently. Additionally, you can set configurable forms for FMs to enter any relevant information during the audit process.

POLIR Integrations for Large Facilities

For more extensive facilities with a receiving warehouse, our Mail & Parcel Workgroup provides the perfect addition to large-scale office supply management for your facility. Consider this; you’re constantly ordering office supplies but unable to match purchase orders. You have hundreds of boxes delivered, but you’re still left unsure of if your order is correct, with the potential that you’ve lost money due to inventory. Using our POLIR, or P.O. line item receiving integration, you can compare purchase orders with deliveries with the click of a button, quickly identifying any discrepancies that may have occurred.

What Are the Benefits of Office Supply Tracking?

Office supply tracking provides more benefits than you may think, easing the burden of everyday supply frustrations and saving your business hundreds of thousands of dollars. First, office supply tracking provides greater inventory control. This allows your team to place orders strategically, and with the supply chain not expected to return to normal next year, pre-planning for inventory is crucial. Using software such as Intra for office supply tracking also provides a plethora of data points to help your team identify any changes that should be made.

For example, our Analytics Dashboard can be configured to show specific assets and quantities. If you see that certain office supplies are depleting significantly, you can adjust your repurchasing schedules to ensure that there is no wait for employees. Finally, prevent the potential for loss and theft by having detailed tracking of any essential office supplies. By creating a chain-of-custody for these assets in Intra, as well as assignment statuses, individuals will generally be more careful in taking care of assets they know they are responsible for.

Invest in SCLogic’s Enterprise Asset Management

Identifying discrepancies in your current asset management system can be overwhelming, and managing office supplies likely fall on the back burner. However, these small asset losses or thefts can add up quickly, costing your entire company revenue and completely altering the accuracy of your office supply inventory. In the age of digital transformation, now is the time to overhaul your asset management ways and step into a new digital era. Email [email protected] or schedule a demo with one of our team members to learn more about our workgroups.