An inventory control system is a process for managing and locating objects or materials. In common usage, the term may also refer to just the software components.
Modern inventory control systems often rely upon barcodes and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to provide automatic identification of inventory objects. In an academic study performed at Wal-Mart, RFID reduced Out of Stocks by 30 percent for products selling between 0.1 and 15 units a day. Inventory objects could include any kind of physical asset: merchandise, consumables, fixed assets, circulating tools, library books, or capital equipment. To record an inventory transaction, the system uses a barcode scanner or RFID reader to automatically identify the inventory object, and then collects additional information from the operators via fixed terminals (workstations), or mobile computers.
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