Inventory Creation

Creating inventory in the SimSort system is fast, easy, and the first step towards keeping your residents happy and your community organized. Follow these quick steps to make your life easier with SimSort.

Expand Locally

We recommend you work neighborhood by neighborhood. The more equipment and items created in the SimSort inventory the more effective the system will be in your daily use. 

Tag Equipment First

Tag walkers, wheelchairs, canes, and mobility equipment first. This equipment is easy to tag, easy to set up, and offers the biggest benefit for tracking. Consider adding SimSort to your quality management program. Train your team with one point person doing daily or weekly scans to prove access to the equipment, and get used to running weekly scan reports to update your quality records.

Tagging mobility equipment makes a great demo! Contact us to get a demo loaner and some free tags! 

Expand to Laundry Next

Communities with central or outsourced laundry services can benefit from the power of SimSort's audit functions as well! If you want to expand to laundry, follow these steps:

Create a Laundry Staging Area

Set up in a small meeting or dining room in the neighborhood if you can, with areas for receiving a bellman cart of clothes, tagging clothes, and adding clothes to the SimSort app inventory. There should be space in between the tagging and inventory areas for a backlog of tagged items.

Work Room by Room

Then work room by room. Use a rolling cart to bring items into your inventory area. If you have 2 or 3 staff, you can have one person tagging, one adding items to the SimSort app inventory, and one person moving items between resident rooms or floating to other jobs. Clothes should flow from the cart, to the tagging station, to the inventory station, and back to the cart.

Working room by room and making sure all the clothes in your work space belong to the same resident helps make sure you assign all items to the correct location. Once an entire batch of clothes is done and back on the cart, the cart can be returned to the resident's room.

Prep your SimSort Software

Configure your SimSort software by adding locations for your Dirty Laundry Room, Clean Laundry Room, and any laundry holding places that you wish to scan items into later. As a quick tip, names can have a space or special character ("_") in front of them to force them to be listed at the top of the locations list.

You may also want to configure any special types (e.g., Clothing, Mobility Equipment, Queen Sheet, Bath Towel, etc.) or status flags for either items (e.g., Wash Separate, Hand Dry) or locations (e.g., Special Soap).

Finally, create locations for the residents in the neighborhood. Add names, room numbers, and a photo of either the resident or the room number sign.

Add Items to Inventory

The steps to create individual items of inventory are:

  1. Add a physical RFID tag to the item using the heat press or sewing machine. Try to place the tag somewhere out of the way, on the inside of a pant cuff or shirt tail if possible.
  2. On the SimSort app, enter the home location and create the Item. Add a description and take a photo. For hanging clothes, you can hang a temporary sticky hook to the wall to take attractive photos. Keep in mind, these photos are how family members will see the clothes.
  3. Link the RFID tag by tapping the "Link One Tag" button with the scanner attached. The scanner will enter a low-power scan mode to catch the nearest tag.

That's it! On average, the whole process takes about 2 minutes for each piece of clothing.

One other feature of the SimSort app is the Add Batch function. Use the radio button control on the New Item page to select "Batch". That will change the Link tag to allow a higher-powered basket scan. All items created this way will have the same information you added, and their own unique RFID tag.

Finishing Up

With 2 or 3 staff working, you should be able to inventory 5 to 6 residents per day. The good news is there's no real time limit on how long it needs to take. The more you inventory, the more the SimSort system can help you, so it's worth doing even if it takes you several days or weeks to complete.