On Tuesday, 21st of March, I will be running a training session for all persons interested in being onboarded for our asset management and inventory management tools. This is in response to requests for training.
If you are not a volunteer, or you are a member of the general public, you’re also welcome to attend for your own interest.
- Snipe-It ( assets.hsbne.org )
- Inventree ( stock.hsbne.org )
The point of the session will be to:
- get teams access with accounts
- establish what we are trying to achieve with this software
- give users an overview of how to operate the software
- give people hands on time with a person to answer questions, and opportunity to learn from everyones questions.
- get feedback on improvements we can make to the system
- establish any next steps that might be discovered
If you would like to attend, please:
- Register your interest by responding below. Every person who responds i will pre-create your accounts for the lesson.
- Please ensure you are onsite 30min before starting time of 7pm. Please be in the green room at 7pm. Please, please do not attend late, its incredibly disruptive and i may just turn you away.
- Please attend with a laptop.
- Optional: Pre download and install the inventree mobile app
Depending on attendance size we will run in either the green room or class room.
I do not have plans at this stage to also have it online on discord. If theres significant interest we can pursue this.
Snipe-It
Snipe it is an asset management app that is designed primarily for businesses to manage IT assets, such as phones and laptops issued to staff. It is self hosted and FOSS.
We utilise it primarily at the moment to document the Test & Tag of everything. The goal is for a lot of the information that currently or previously resided in the wiki to be in the asset software. This is information such as maintenance logs, mods, test and tag history, etc. It also has a function for tracking who a tool is ‘checked out’ to, which we may use for a number of things, like allowing the loan of some items and similar.
Why bother? Primarily its so we can have a good system for tracking compliance, which is important for safety, insurance, etc. Having maintenance logs is important when we need to go back and understand the history of a machine.
Inventree
Inventree is inventory management app that is designed to be quite versatile. It can track machines, parts and consumables for machines, suppliers, generate BOMs, purchase orders, track locations, print labels etc.
We use inventree to help systematise and ease the management of consumables and materials for HSBNE. It lets us track info like keeping spare parts for machines, where to buy them from or have bought them from. Or establishing standard bulk suppliers for things like sandpaper, cleaning supplies, machine supplies like oil/grease etc, vending machine supplies, materials for sale, filament, laser consumables etc etc.
Ideally we want to get to a point where we never run out of something. IE, we always stock up to 5 bandsaw blades, every month we do stocktake, if bandsaw blades are <=2 we purchase more from the supplier of blades detailed in the app. Rather than going to random shops and buying random supplies, such as say hand soap, it lets us just buy a few tubs in bulk every quarter from a supplier of whatever preferred product we choose.
If we decide its worthwhile, for things where we build rather than buy, this can help track the parts for the project and generate boms, purchase orders etc etc.
Why bother? In the end, it just helps keep a lid on some of the chaos, reduces downtime, lets people focus on their roles rather than running around getting supplies etc. It results in a better experience for all members because they’re not coming to work on a project and finding us out of glue or whatever because it hasnt been reported. A bit of organisation should result in less work overall.
