How item availability makes the life of an equipment manager easier

‘Item availability' is a key phrase in any equipment manager’s dictionary.

Think about it. All the careful handling of equipment, the meticulous tagging, setting up a modern equipment room chock full of high-quality gear… All of it doesn’t matter much when nobody knows for sure if an item is actually on the shelves or not.

Reliable equipment managers should have a solid grip on item availability. Preferably in real-time, and as accurately as possible. In fact, it has become a hygiene factor of operational efficiency.

Here are 6 ways in which item availability makes the life of an equipment manager easier:

1. You want to know what to rent for upcoming projects

No equipment room in the world has everything. At some point in time, someone will come knocking, asking for a specific piece of gear that you don’t own.

With a clear view of item availability, you don’t have to let this person or project down. Instead, you can just rent the necessary gear well in time. Provided that the project is not tomorrow, obviously.

2. You want to find specific items quickly

“Do we have a Laowa 24 mm F/14 2X macro probe lens? Let me check that for you.”

Sometimes, someone just needs that one specific item. Faced with such a request, you could flip through all the lenses in your inventory until you stumble upon the right one (or not). Or you can search for it in a heartbeat by combining different search filters. Can you guess what the wiser choice is here?

3. You want to be able to take items out of circulation

Gear being borrowed is not the only factor that affects availability. Sometimes gear just breaks or gets damaged. Depending on the severity of the problem, you might want to flag an item as “Broken” and take it out of the available inventory.

4. You want to provide self-service for your users

If you trust your user base, you might want to give them certain self-service rights. The most basic would be to browse through your equipment inventory. Which, ideally, anyone can do at any time from anywhere.

5. You want to plan ahead with your resource management

Sometimes, someone needs that boom mic right now. Other times, they’re looking to use it on April 5th. That shouldn’t make any difference to you as long as you have an availability calendar to work with. This helps you avoid double bookings too.

6. You want to spend your time efficiently

It’s easy to lose oversight when equipment is constantly changing hands. When is that camera coming back? Is that battery pack still complete? Where is that lens right now?

Having to manually search through documents to check availability is not a good use of anyone’s time. You should be able to know in a split second whether an item is available or not. Anything less is simply a waste of time.

7. You want your users to work as productively as possible

Of course, everyone else’s time matters as well, regardless of whether your equipment users are savvy pros or eager students. And sifting through a slew of item pages to check the availability of assets can be quite time-consuming.

Help yourself and your users by keeping productivity high, even in the most hectic periods, with a real-time and 100% accurate view of item availability.

Stay on top of Item availability with Cheqroom

Tired of worrying about the availability of your gear? Look no further than Cheqroom to stay on top of things. Our software gives you full visibility of every item in your inventory, complete with a visual timeline. You can mark items as fully or partially available, allowing for check-outs, reservations, or custody, and give users the self-service rights they need if you’d like to share the workload.

And that’s not all Cheqroom can do. Request a demo or start a free trial today.