Inventory Management System for Education Institutions

Abstract

K. J. Somaiya Institute of Engineering and Information Technology (KJSIEIT) affiliated to the University of Mumbai (UoM) manages deadstock/inventory in a combination of two systems the traditional roster system and spreadsheet tools such as Google Sheets and MS Excel. The catalogues and inventory listings are also manually recorded on physical paper that is not part of a single or unified database. In addition, tasks such as inter-departmental lending/borrowing, scrapping and renewal are also done manually or sometimes in a verbal manner which can cause many issues such as redundancy, repetitive entry or even undocumented transactions. Clearly, the record-keeping of laboratory equipment(s) and other similar inventory is a critical issue for most engineering institutes. This project's prime focus is to establish an advanced system for keeping records of the inventory by the means of a software-based solution; an Inventory Management System (IMS) for Education Institutes. This should reduce the problems surrounding manual management such as loss of time, quality of work and maintenance cost(s) by the means of an organic fusion of Inventory Management and the IT environment. This system's frontend development is done using three programming languages JavaScript (JS), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). The software is built on a standard WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack with LDAP authentication on the backend. Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP) with MySQL for native database management and storage.