Live Inventory tracking / UPC Standards

[mark78]

Is there already, or would there be interest in a computer system that could keep your livestock inventory for you, from the time a fish comes in to the time it leaves.

Is there any type of standard currently as to the barcoding of livestock throughout wholesalers, shipping and retailers? Is this even a feasable goal? ie. a diodon holocanthus is always UPC 0963 then say add an extra 3 digits for the wholesale location, or maybe where the fish came from (may be really hard to get exporters into this let alone wholesalers)

Wouldn't it be nice, to be able to track a fish all the way through the system? You get a clown fish with a UPC number on the bag, you scan it, that same UPC gets added to your retail system with quantity and added as inventory. This can also add some accountability. Perhaps a way to track bad livestock back to a specific vendor / exporter...lots of ideas here I'm just not sure they are feasable given the vast industry we are in.

Mark

 

[MaryHM]

The Marine Aquarium Council is particularly interested in tracking fish. You may try contacting them.

 

[Anonymous]

OMG! - He wants to use a computer to track fish!! 8O 8O 8O

QUICK! - Nail him to the cross, publicly flog then flay him and finally burn him alive!

---

:wink: Welcome to RDO Mark, do a little hunting around here and you'll see that some folks do employ some amount of barcoding in shop, but like Mary pointed out, MAC is about the only organization so far thats trying to accomplish it "from reef to retail".


:lol: If only AMDA would set its sights on something so worthy..

 

[mark78]

Cool I am interested in hearing more opinions on this.

Before the flames start...I am not so much looking at it from a MAC standpoint, but a retailer and wholesaler standpoint. A wholesaler may like to get an emailed report from thier customers, stating what fish sold, what died, what is still in the retailers stock. Likewise for a retailer, which fish sold, which died, which they have...someone calls "do you have a royal gramma?" Clerk can look it up in 2 seconds, or even have livestock quantity live online for customers to check (tho that may reduce dry goods walk by traffic so not a great idea). If you lose livestock, you can track back better to hopefully avoid such in the future.

I'm currently persueing an aquarium service business, but since I spent 7 years in IT and have a few developer friends...this is something I have thought about doing on the side in our spare time. A lot of work to standardize all species to 1 UPC number nation wide, its done in the grocery industry though...

In fact there is a huge new gov. thing going on in the grocery industry right now, called point of origin. All foods imported from other countrys need to have code of origin tags on them with lots of info relating to biological state etc...If it can be done for farmers and food why not aquatic livestock?

Glad I discovered this board, lots of reading to do tonight
Noticing way to many of the same post over and over already, thought I'd throw out something a little different lol :p

Mark

 

[flameangel1]

Barcoding of fish ??? Checking inventory of a fish via looking at your computer ???
Good grief, I can't imagine that one.

We are talking about LIVE fish here and not dry goods. Best way to know how many and which fish you have in the holding tanks, is to go LOOK !!!

Do a "body count" when you feed them at least twice a day- always check the floors in front of the tanks, in case one jumped- LOOK at the fish BEFORE you say you have one for sale (what if it got in a fight with another fish and has a torn fin- or is not eating enough yet or is still stressed by people etc etc. ( then it is not "for sale "yet )

Tracking fish should be done with HUMAN eyes, not some number on a computer .
These are NOT just products, they are living animals.

Cripes, I can't name all the times that my dry goods distributers have told me, "yes, we have 500 bags of salt in stock and will send it out to you today"--Hmmmm, now why does my invoice say O/S, two hours later???
Yep, they use bar codes- and I never knew salt bags to hide in the rocks or jump out of a tank either..
( ps, hmmm, Mark, have you ever heard of "fill rate" in this industry ?? )

Sorry. speaking here as a LFS owner and not as a big time importer etc.

 

[Anonymous]

We use barcodes for all of our fish, but it's not as practical as you think it is. When dealing with hundreds of thousands of fish, in a full line shop, keeping track of all of them is sloppy at best. For example, it's not difficult to keep track of your powder blues, emperor angels, and lions, but when the same system is used to track sales of hermit crabs, and turbo snails, there is bound to be some margin of error built in. (ie we buy 2000 feeder comets a week, sell ~1500, and never have any left at the end of the week. )

 

[mark78]

Well, what I was thinking is say a wholesaler sends you a shipment of fish. Each bag is bar coded to reflect the livestock in the bag. Or, you could do it on the invoice. You have a line "12 green chromis", with a barcode next to it. You scan the barcode, and it adds 12 green chromis to your inventory. As they are sold they are obviously removed, if one dies in the tank, you mark the fish as dead in the system and its removed from inventory...

Good points about not for sale, sick fish, etc etc...but would give more accountability to the livestock. I can see how its not worth using though in a small LFS, but it sure beats walking around with a clip board and hash marks for dead fish imo. Most stores keep really poor account of losses from what I have seen.

Sounds like not so much interest anyways was jus curious thanks

 

[dizzy]

Mark,
I would have to think that the MAC certified stores have all this stuff worked out. Since none of them post here, I would suggest going to www.aquariumcouncil.org and finding a list of certified dealers there. Surely one of them will be willing to tell you how they do it.
Mitch

 

[Anonymous]

So how do you account for unseen carpet surfers, fish eaten by fish with out your knowledge or fish that die and sucked over the overflow? How about an employee accidently sold a Emperator juv. as a Koran Juv. ?

 

[Anonymous]

That does not compute.

 

[JennM]

So how do you account for unseen carpet surfers, fish eaten by fish with out your knowledge or fish that die and sucked over the overflow? How about an employee accidently sold a Emperator juv. as a Koran Juv. ?

No kidding... all our tanks are covered with eggcrate, but if you peer down the back behind the tanks, you will see "krispy kritters"... mostly dartfish and the like. I even bought a set of mechanics' mirrors so I can see what's back there, even if I can't retrieve it...

I had a ~3 lb cowfish jump... EWWWW I don't know how he got the velocity to get himself out of the water but it was during the night and there was a lightning storm, so perhaps he was startled?

Every now and then something disappears without a trace... I've had an eel AWOL... never found a body, but it vanished. Prolly living in my pipes someplace

If you buy 20 chromis one week, sell 10 and order 10 more... how do you know which chromis are which? I mark my date with the most recent shipment so the customer knows what the "newest" fish are in a given tank.. for singles I date each individual.

My software tracks sales by sku... Animal Graphics makes a nifty set of ID labels, with a 3 digit sku so I just used those in my own software... tank raised ocellaris are 019, yellow tang is 486, Mexican turbo is 693 and so on... I can tell at a glance how many 019 I sold this day, week, month, year etc., but I don't care to track how long an individual fish lived in the store. FWIW I've got a black spotted cardinal which will celebrate its 2nd year anniversary with me on the 30th of this month He's so ugly nobody wants him... but he's proof positive that my system can sustain fish in the long term, and the card with his info on it says: Black Spotted Cardinal (price) 05/30/02 (Yes, 2002!)

My store is small... I know my individual fishes, I can look at a one and give a good guess about how long it has been there without looking at the card. I can see how something more scientific might be good for "big box" stores, but I have to agree with Judy, when you take stock, you really have to look at the fishes. If your computer says you have 3 but they aren't fit to sell, you will just annoy the customer that called to inquire, and doesn't find out til he gets there, that the 3 are substandard.

Jenn

 

[aquatic ian]

i think its a great idea mark , industry take up might be a bit slow , but as progressive thinking or computer orientated staff come along it would be picked up .

we have slowly been building a pos system around live stock for our own needs (which still needs actual human checking ) but if some one introduced a standard , well thought out code system i think that would be a great idea


every one in shops knows you might loose a few fish as surfers or crispys or even staff error , but at least if you know what the error margin is you can do something about it . diferent stock presents diferent problems

i can remember about 20 years ago when the nursery / horticulture industry was going through the same debate , about barcoding live plants and the problems encountered ( not sure if some one set up a standard or not in the end )

im still weighing up the best way to id and track individual coral in our store and would welcome any input
cheers ian

 

[JennM]

For me, there is no direct benefit to tracking each individual live specimen.

Dry goods get rotated for freshness... I can track inventory turns and decide stocking levels.

However livestock is such a different animal. Blue tangs might move well all year 'round but they aren't always available all year 'round, so it's a mute point. I could have 4 colonies of the same coral, but one isn't as pretty as the other 4... so it sits and sits while I sell and re-stock the other 3 over and over... I've got a nice green Lobophyllia that even didn't sell during my big sale last fall... no particular reason, it's a healthy, pretty piece, but nobody has looked at it and "had the perfect spot" for it...

I suppose there is some statistical benefit to computerizing it, but for me at this point in time it would be more work than it's worth, and the "statistics" can't track things like the visual appeal of one Trachyphyllia versus another. You can't force a customer to buy the one you've had longer...

In fact, having to spend extra time on computer administration takes time away from the visual inspection of those animals.

I don't think it's a bad idea, but for many purposes, it's not a practical one, especially for the smaller retailer.

Perhaps at an exporter/importer-wholesaler level this might be a good idea.

Jenn

 

[mark78]

Thanks Jenn thats the type of feed back I was looking for. I've worked at 2 stores, but its been awhile, a lot I didn't account for.

Basically it would be similar to what you already have, except the fishes number would be the same industry wide.

I see how you don't gain much though, especially the smaller store. This would be something to start at wholesalers and if all them do it, stores may certainly follow.

 

[Anonymous]

When I worked at a full line pet store, we went thru a semi truck of Nutro dog food every 2 to 3 weeks. With that kind of product movement bags got broken. Even with out $50K computer system, it could not account for bag brackage, nor could the employees keep it up to date with all the bags flying around. It was always off by a 5 - 10 bags. Same with can food. Cans got dented, rolled under racks, were stolen, etc, etc, so the count was always off. We did entire store inventorys quartly to find those mistakes, but man what an ordeal to undertake 4 times a year. We tracked every DOA/DAA of livestock we found, had it in a database, and used it to tell trends, thats it. Even with our near perfect record keeping in that department (fish), we knew not to use the data as a tracking system as so many fish were unaccountable for. I know I lost many fish to cube jumpers that found the wrong cube (big mouth+little fish=gone for good). At a drop of a dime, we could tell what wholesaler we found best for each animal, but for orderring, we always walked the rows physically looking at current stock 1st, then checked the database before orderring to see who was best for what.

Whew, I couldn't, and wouldn't even think about such a system for wholesalers, the more product moved, the more errors. In wholesale, our errors on stock reports equates to lower fill rates (no to be confused with "box fillers"), which lead customers away from our door. Orderring should never be done from a computer alone, it should always include a physical walk thru IMO. For tracking batches of fish, computers are usefull, but not a tool to totally depend on.

 

[Anonymous]

This would be something to start at wholesalers and if all them do it, stores may certainly follow.

Wholesalers can't even get on the same page when it comes tothe major issue of illegal activities such as the use of cyainde in collections, how on earth would you get them to agree on such a trivial matter as this? The fact is, wholesalers sue each other, hate each other, and only once have almost all of them been in the same room together (Mary and Bobs doing with a lttle help from MAC and the USCRTF). If it was forced on them, they'd use it. It would have to be an act of Government though, as they won't listen to anyone else, belive me.

 

[fishinchick]

So does keeping logs of where stuff comes from and what suppliers etc count as using the computer??

We know what supplier our fish come from by means of a tracking number system we keep written on the tanks. When we get a new batch of fish, we write down the vendor code. We keep logs of problem fish as well.
Not to the extent of having a program that tracks each fish individually though. I think that would take up too much time and make the customers crazy because it would slow down production.

 

[DaisyPolyp]

It's not individual fish you would want to track as much as "buying trends". This is a huge wave right now in retail, and it is standardizing on EPC (electronic product code) with passive RFID stickers as the method of accomplishing it.
Example: a wholesaler in LA can tell one of its retail customers in little rock that 75% of stores within 20 miles are selling A.Percula at double the rate of A.Ocellaris. Result: LFS can modify their order to capture the market's move and a solid relationship forms between the 2 parties.

 

[mark78]

Yah, I worked for a software company who had a product that stored history for the last 100 years (well not that much yet) and could predict and tell buyers how much of what to order when, it was a pretty amazing system. I hadn't even thought of that but it would fit in there with some work.

 

[rsman]

I R programmer
I R small time fish breeder
I have programmed POS & related systems

I do have a catalog of all my fish, and my programs account for a un-counted fish loss, its soo much easier for me to point a wireless reader at bar code on the tank enter the number then if its a sale or a dead fish, I dont use it for an active in inventory count, but I do get to 100% when I empty the tank (replace this with instore inventory day counting) when I make up the difference counting all non sold as dead, I know how many I saw dead, how many went for sale, and how many went concrete surfing its even caught a few cases I didnt where the tank needed modifying because to many went concrete surfing. because I dont sell retail my system is missing many things that would be needed. but a small store could impliment everything my setup is missing to fill in the blanks and run with it, even totally ignoring the wholesalers use of computer or paper tracking.