How can I optimize inventory management for my multi-vendor manufacturing business?

Shopify Discussion
1

I am a manufacturer. We make most of our own products but also utilize other companies to support us with some production or phases of production.
Example, A product made in house then goes to Vendor A for coating then returns to us for packaging.
Example 2, we are busy and request Vendor B to make some parts. Those parts then come to us for some work then to Vendor A for finishing then back to us.
That’s the production side.

Selling: we sell in multiple online venues (FBA, Etsy, Ebay for example) as well as on Shopify. Our products have multiple variations and so listing from one place and sending out automatically to all venues hasn’t been possible. With that, it also means inventory is managed independently.

Currently I manage this with multiple spreadsheets. Manually. Approx 800 skus. It takes a minute as you can imagine - making sure we have the right production happening, the right products in the right place. Stock counts are manually changed from Vendor to Vendor to storage to customer or FBA. (I do not need to track FBA with the same system).

I am considering switching to a 2D bar code system based on our SKUs. The idea being:
Having Vendors A and B set up in Shopify vendors.
Our storage facility set up as Location 1. Shopify website as it’s own location so that I can list part for sale on Shopify and have enough remaining for other locations. So, I might have 100 in storage, 30 available on Shopify, 30 deducted and sent to Amazon FBA, the remaining 40 split as for sale at Ebay/Etsy which would NOT be connected to Shopify.

The idea is to scan product barcodes as they move from vendor to vendor to storage. And scan out with each sale (if sold on Etsy, for example). Not sure about Shopify sales, I assume they’d update the inventory automatically once fulfilled?

Issues. I am not sure I can do all that using Shopify as-is without extra apps.
Is Shopify inventory capable of this? Are they are any apps that do this?
Can this be done simply with my spreadsheets, somehow incorporating the scanner with excel?

I am not opposed to purchasing software or a nominal fee for an app but I don’t have a high monthly budget for it either.

Thanks for any guidance here.

2

Did you ever find a solution for this? I’ve had the hardest time finding an inventory management app that allows me to pull inventory from the same product that can also be used across other products (kind of like bundle but now really). Appreciate your creativity around using “Vendor” and "Location… I may need to try this.

3

Funnily enough, I am finally getting to try this. I never did get an app and when I came to do locations, Shopify had a limit of 2 on my plan. However, I discovered that recently they increased that capacity to 1,000!

The method is a little longwinded, but yes - now that Shopify has increased the number of locations available for standard plans, I can do what I wanted to do and I am in the process of setting it up. I have created vendors and locations for the various stages of production, and I have tested dummy POs creation → receiving → storage locations.

I am creating QR codes from SKUs (I am looking to download the QR Generator app Releasit which says it can create codes from any shopify data so we will see). I plan to print these and stick them all the product baskets. That’s on the to do list for tomorrow.

I have purchased a couple of low cost mobile phones (with no SIM, just wifi) that staff can use to scan products in/out with the shopify app.

Hopefully within a couple of days I am going to know if it truly works for what I want.