Managing Task is similar to Managing Inventory

The COVID - 19 situation has led to piling up of tasks and increased pressure on all businesses to clear up and handle the new challenges. While working on the development of task management application which could make it easier to manage the tasks and also keep a track of work that is piling up, we realized that features of any task are very much relatable to managing an inventory. 

Just like how managing inventory is vital to any business and issues with inventory can contribute to business losses, even failures. By striking a good balance between tasks that are pending and ones that are completed can help an organisation thrive. Good inventory management practice is equivalent to controlled cost of operations, a good task management practice, along with controlling cost can help with understanding and mitigating risks.

Value stream mapping which is an improvement tool used to implement lean concepts, focuses on waste reduction and inventory control. The underlying idea is to make the process so seamless that there is no inventory in the waiting at any work station and the work / processing happens on pull basis rather than push basis. Similar fundamental principle could be adopted while managing tasks where each individual is not piled up with lot of tasks and they are focusing on doing tasks that is requested by the client.

Inventory analytics plays a major role in controlling inventory as it helps identify items, that are not moving, items that are nearing stock out, items at different work stations and ones that are ready for dispatch and time taken for inventory to move and process through different stages. A similar analytics module can help one in controlling tasks, whereby one can figure out, the tasks that are pending with particular users and their department, tasks pending at different categories, tasks allocated and yet to be worked upon, tasks that are completed on time or delayed and overall estimated processing cost of certain tasks.

We are working on developing a platform that can combine the lean management philosophy and inventory management practices, to be able to manage, track and process tasks in a more effective manner to enable organisations to respond better to customer demand and controlling cost of operations.