Template for Digital Stock Management

The Digital Stock Management Template is created by the 510 Data & Digital team of the Netherlands Red Cross. It is designed to help Red Cross Red Crescent National Societies strengthen their management of stock and warehouse activities by having a systematic reporting way using familiar tools Kobo Toolbox and PowerBI.

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Table of Contents

• What is Digital Stock Management?
• Features
• Requirements
• Setup
• How to Use
• Read more

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What is Digital Stock Management?

Digital Stock Management is a centralised stock management tool that collect, summarize and displays stocking activity information in warehouses. The tool makes use of Kobo Toolbox and PowerBI which are commonly used among Red Cross Red Crescent National Societies in their operations.

Standardized but highly customised:

• It is set with standard questions in stock and warehouse management, so organisations can easily adapt it to their own needs and contexts.
• The data model is kept as simple as possible. All calculations and consolidations are done within Power BI queries.
• This combination makes the system easy to understand, maintain, and use, even as teams make their own custom changes.

Therefore, this template is designed so anyone with basic to intermediate skills of Data and Information Management can deploy and lead the implementation with ease.

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Features

• Centralise registration of receivals & issuance with simple and consistent data entry

• Overview of the current inventory and values to see all inventory, consolidations and activities at a glance

• Support decision making based on all latest information about items in one place

• Integration with:

  • Commonly used data collection tool Kobo Toolbox
  • Power BI dashboard for visualisation and reporting

• Notify users via email about inventory and activities¹ to timely act on these items

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Requirements

Hard Requirements

• A KoboToolbox account: those affiliated with National Society a free account can be created at Kobo IFRC server
• Install Power BI desktop

Recommendations

• A workspace in Power BI service for better managing published Power BI dashboard and user roles.
• Have an admin role in the workspace.

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Setup

The tool template comsists of 2 Kobo forms and a Power BI dashboard:

• Form 1 - New registration.xlsx
• Form 2 - Warehouse management.xlsx
• Stocking Warehouses.pbix

Basic contents in this tool is already made use in various cases. It is ready to be connected and deployed as is. Follow Deploy to do so.

Of course, the contents can be customised to your own local context, such as currency of goods. Follow first Customizations for these adjustments, then deploy.

Customizations

• Add local currency to data collection forms:

  Open Form 1 xls file, go to question name currency (type calculate) in sheet survey, change the value in calculation column to the local currentcy name ISO code e.g. "EUR" question in the 2 Kobo xls forms

• Populate item category options:

  In Form 1 xls file, go to sheet choices edit or add more options for item category to your need. Make sure to use the exact same list_name value in all options : item_category.

• Dashboard

  Open the Power BI dashboard template project file with Power BI desktop, add NS logo in the dashboard (by inserting image) on the upper left corner in all dashboard pages.

Deploy

1. Deploy forms

1. In Kobo platform, create 2 new projects by uploading the 2 xls form, rename the project titles if needed
2. Data from Form 1 - New registration linked with Form 2 - Warehouse management using Dynamic Data Attachment. Follow instructions to link Form 1 (parent) to Form 2 (children).
3. Deploy the 2 forms
4. Generate named exports of the 2 forms then get their synchronous export links

2. Deploy dashboard

On your computer:

5. Open the Power BI dashboard template project file. In Transform data, select in the Queries panel a query e.g. "Form 1 - New registration", and replace the link in FileURL with the synchronous export link of the corresponding Kobo form.
6. Do the same for the other query e.g. "Form 2 - Warehouse management".
7. Make sure the query steps are valid after the replacement.
8. Publish the dashboard to your workspace in the Power BI service

In the Power BI workspace:

9. Verify data source credentials of the published dashboard
10. Enable auto-refresh
11. Share the published dashboard by giving people access to the workspace.

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How to Use

This diagram depicts the use of Digital Stock Management. It includes relevant processes, people and technology as well as how they connect to each other, where:

• Process: procurement of stocks, stock arrivals, stock outgoings, reporting, etc
• People: Disaster Manager, Logistic officer, Warehouse manager, IM officer
• Technology: Kobo Toolbox for data collection, PowerBI for data visualisation

For more in-depth guides for specific scenarios, see the Scenarios of use.

In short:

1. When there are new items, or new warehouses, or new donor/project that are not known before, use Form 1 - New registration to register them.

   Ideally, this should be done at Logistics/Produrement at HQ level who has all overviews.

2. When reporting an activity at a warehouse, use Form 2 - Warehouse management to register goods in or out. Form 2 also include possibility to take photos relevant document which can be displayed in the dashboard.

   This form should be used at warehouses by store manager.

3. The dashboard's queries will perform all set calculation and visualise automatically.

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Read more

• Data model
• Report and email notification
• Scenarios of use

Footnotes

1. Additional feature, see report email notification ↩