Proceedings of Mechanical Engineering Research Day 2018, pp. 180-181, May 2018 __________ © Centre for Advanced Research on Energy E-Inventory management system using android mobile application at Faculty of Engineering Technology laboratory stores Rohana Abdullah 1,2,* , Kek Zi Xiang 1 , Muhammad Ilman Hakimi Chua Abdullah 1.3 1) Faculty of Engineering Technology, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Hang Tuah Jaya, 76100 Durian Tunggal, Melaka, Malaysia. 2) Advanced Manufacturing Centre, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Hang Tuah Jaya, 76100 Durian Tunggal, Melaka, Malaysia. 3) Centre for Advanced Research on Energy, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Hang Tuah Jaya, 76100 Durian Tunggal, Melaka, Malaysia. * Corresponding e-mail: rohana_abdullah@utem.edu.my Keywords: Inventory management system; android mobile technology ABSTRACT – Keeping accurate material inventory is critical to ensure smooth operational activity. The academic laboratory was facing issues with inaccurate inventory record. This study is about designing an electronic inventory control mobile application to manage the inventory and improve the stock record accuracy. The mobile application was developed using the Android system and is called E-Inventory. The mobile E-Inventory application was successfully tested by the academic staffs and engineering assistants. The E-inventory has proven able to reduce the time to access inventory by 80% and to accurate track inventory compared to manual stock count. 1. INTRODUCTION Inventory control is very important to an organization because all the stock must be managed, controlled and tracked at anytime and anywhere. Nowadays, inventory control is even more crucial to success and sustainability. Inaccurate inventory control can lead to lost business profits. Chuang and Oliva [1] claimed that IRI (Inventory record inaccuracy) reduces a company’s total profits through a study on a retail store which has an IRI of 29% causing the company losing 10% profits. Manually managing the stock may be inaccurate, consume time and also prone to human error. Among the factors causing the inventory record inaccuracy; (i) missing main sources of stock, (ii) misplacement of stock and (iii) stock transaction errors [2]. To solve these issues, inventory control requires a computerized system to better manage the inventory [3]. With the increased amount of material variations and quantity, manually tracking and counting inventory is nearly impossible. Hence, there are many types of inventory computer software available in the market. However, relying on inventory control and tracking methods solely on a desktop computer is no longer feasible. In 2017, there are almost 20 million smart phone uses in Malaysia [4]. Thus, there is a vast opportunity to develop application software using smart phones for user convenience. There are 101 laboratories in the Faculty of Engineering Technology, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka. These laboratories require various consumables materials for the laboratory activities. The record keeping and retrieving were done manually using a yellow form and an Excel spreadsheet. The location of the various stores also added to the issue of sharing information between the departments and tracking similar inventories. These consumable goods need proper management in order to ensure that the students’ learning process runs smoothly at all times but still keeping the costs of keeping the inventory at a minimum. Thus, the aim of this study is to develop a system to accurately manage these consumable goods in storage. The use of the E-Inventory system has helped to improve the efficiency of the laboratory consumables materials management. 2. METHODOLOGY The project methodology employed in this study is using the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) [5]. The SDLC consists of project planning, system analysis, design, testing and Implementation. 3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 3.1 Project planning In the project planning stage, the scope of work is set to focus on solving inventory management issue of the manufacturing department consumables store. Through literature reviews, relevant information on inventory management and latest technology on mobile application was analysed. Among the free applications evaluated from the Amazon Application Store include Instant Inventory, Barcodery, Smart Inventory [6]. 3.2 System analysis In this phase, the issues at the consumable stores were analysed. Interviews were conducted with the store manager, lecturers and engineering assistants to map the current inventory management process. Among the information gathered from the interview session were methods to receiving stock, withdrawing stock, replenishing stock, counting stock and requesting new stock. 3.3 System design The software, hardware and network requirement for the E-Inventory were identified at this phase. Decisions were made to use (i) Fireball cloud database to store and manage the inventory data and (ii) Android