Envanterium is a product of ENV Technology, which I co-founded with my wife and brother while finalizing my PhD studies. After two failed startups in their ideation phases, I was reluctant to handle the management and productization side of starting a business. Therefore, I took on the role of development. I learned all the technologies used in Envanterium while developing them.
Envanterium is a stock-taking service product that provides both software and operational solutions for stock-taking processes. Due to regulatory requirements in Turkey, stock-taking is a significant industry, as any company holding stock must conduct an inventory with a third-party contractor at least once a year. My brother had over nine years of experience in the industry before Envanterium, giving us access to his expertise and insights into the industry’s pain points.
Before Envanterium, stock-taking in Turkey was a batch process. Companies would request a stock-taking process from contractors, who would hire blue-collar workers and give them barcode scanners. These workers would scan every product and then collectively transfer all data, which might or might not be entirely accurate. Envanterium approached this problem from a different angle. Our desktop application, created with Electron.js, creates a network where any device with our barcode scanning application can communicate freely. This allowed us to catch mistaken stock takes before the entire operation was completed and allowed customers to validate data while the operation was still ongoing. Besides solving data communication problems, Envanterium provided customers with a dashboard that generates instant reports when their stock-taking processes are completed. These improvements made Envanterium a fast-growing tech startup in a slow-moving industry.
We also changed how stock-taking processes are handled by utilizing mobile devices. Barcode scanners are typically clunky devices that need to be part of our company stock, frequently moving between different parts of Turkey based on our customers’ stock-taking process requirements. This created a major problem as barcode scanners could be damaged during transfer or while in use. We developed a React Native application that can communicate either with our local application or directly with our backend, allowing us to use any mobile device our blue-collar employees have.
As the demand for our stock-taking processes grew, we faced another challenge: finding employees for processes in different parts of Turkey. During this time, I moved away from development to the operational side of the business. We stopped outsourcing employees from different services and started hiring them directly. With the excess number of employees in our portfolio, we decided to start another business, ENV HR, to reutilize our employee portfolio for different purposes for our customers.
Envanterium was one of the main stock-taking companies in Turkey in 2021 when hyperinflation began. As the minimum wage drastically increased more than once per year and we couldn’t reflect these changes in our yearly contracts with customers, our profit margins quickly shrank. We faced the choice of either exiting the business operationally or failing due to cash-flow issues. At the beginning of 2022, we decided to shut down Envanterium operations.