Offline Inventory Management with Solar Sister 

With the rise of new natural disasters, wars, and the need for vaccines and medication, we are reminded of the extreme challenges faced by last mile distribution – including getting essential products to people and communities, quickly.
TaroWorks has worked with over 140 nonprofits and social enterprises to deliver impact in hard-to-reach areas all over the world. Many of these organizations have inventory components to their mission, like distributing water filters or critical medications, and have important needs to track inventory levels – especially as they scale to new geographies, or provide more items. To support these needs, we have developed TaroWorks Enterprise – a mobile offline inventory management system that helps track stock levels and product movements between suppliers, warehouses, and last mile distribution agents, all while offline from a smartphone or tablet.

Transforming an Offline Inventory Management System:

On June 22, 2022, we joined Natasha Wheatley, Data and Systems Manager of Solar Sister for a webinar to discuss how Solar Sister is using TaroWorks Enterprise to transform their offline inventory management system to better track their assets. 

Solar Sister recruits, trains, and supports women from energy-poor areas who are interested in entrepreneurship and passionate about bringing light and clean energy to their communities. They have reached over 3.4 million people with clean energy and recruited over 7,400 entrepreneurs, 87% of whom are women.

Behind the scenes of Solar Sister

Solar Sister has a global team that includes a small staff in the United States, and sizable in-country staff members in each of their working countries. In the United States, they have hands-on administration staff who have deep knowledge of their inventory system to make critical decisions around what products they need to bring into their inventories. On the ground, Solar Sister employs country directors to understand what is happening across their network and ensure that the full potential of all entrepreneurs is being realized. Finally, Solar Sister relies heavily on their Business Development Associates (BDA’s), as they maintain the inventory warehouses. These team members are the primary vehicle for logging inventory movements and understanding what products the entrepreneurs need. 

Combining TaroWorks and Salesforce

Since 2012, Solar Sister has been using Salesforce to track its success and build entrepreneurship. They soon started using TaroWorks to reduce human errors and speed up the process in which their BDAs could forward the information they gathered in the field from the entrepreneurs to the country HQ offices. Before TaroWorks, they were relying on different communications, including phone calls, emails, and SMS texts which had to then be entered into Salesforce by HQ staff. Using multiple communications tools caused delays and missing information. To speed up the process, Solar Sister introduced TaroWorks for data collection.

In 2020, Solar Sister looked to revamp its system to keep up with their evolving business practices. To do so, they looked to TaroWorks Enterprise to focus on their offline inventory management and manage their payments and account balances. At this time, they faced these specific inventory challenges:

To revamp their system, Solar Sister worked with Mogli on an 18-month intensive process, from initial conversations to a finalized operating system with trained individuals.

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Inventory Management NOW

Since the success of the TaroWorks Enterprise implementation, Solar System has leveraged key elements of its offline inventory management system including the introduction of ‘products,’’ inventory movements and inventory audits, the concept of a ‘price book, and a system for returns and replacements.

Introduction of Products:

Tracking Offline Inventory Movements and Conducting Audits:

A Way to Manage Prices:

Returns and Replacements:

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Lessons Learned

For Solar Sister, switching to TaroWorks Enterprise was a successful, but long process. They did a lot of work to critically think about how everything would fit.

 “Now we have more accurate sales numbers, accurate inventory records and purchasing is so much more efficient” – Natasha Wheatley. 

Natasha stated that through the process, Solar Sister learned two valuable lessons:

• Be willing to limit both view and edit privileges. It is important to determine the simplest way to get what you need and do that, to not overwhelm your field staff with more information than they want or need. 
• Take the time to critically think out your plan before you begin. Determine the simplest way to accomplish what you need. Solar Sister had multiple calculations to measure their product value and realized they were overcomplicating things and spending too much time working on unnecessary automations

“It is important to be intentional about thinking about what your staff actually needs to see, and what is useful for their jobs”.

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Watch the Full Webinar here: