AAHA Moments

While attending AAHA CON 2026, Sitehound was lucky enough to participate in a focus group that allowed representatives from several different types of practices to share their personal concerns with inventory management, i.e., horror stories.

One woman was telling tails about how she oversees inventory for a group that runs two different hospitals, one specialty clinic, and one roving big-animal practice that works in wildlife preservation... often having to tranquilize and relocate bears. Her main concern with her inventory was "theft." No, it wasn't that thieves were breaking into the different locations and stealing; it's that the vets within the different practices were "stealing" from each other.

Let's say you take your own hard-earned money to the store to buy yourself a six-pack of your favorite soda and drink one, placing the other five sodas in the fridge. The next day you come back to reach for one of the five remaining, only to find your little brother and his friends have drunk all of your soda. Like, you could have sworn it was just there yesterday and now it's all gone! Your mom tells you to get over it. "We're all in the same family, so we have to learn to share." PTSD, anyone?

This inventory manager's anecdotal evidence was that she ordered things specific to the different practices in her group (family), but that vets would go over to the other practice to "see if they have some" (as if they're siblings), and then take the inventory for use at their own hospital (like taking it from one bedroom to another), which is in the same family... so it's not really stealing, right? Maybe your practice isn't as big as this example, but in veterinary medicine we've all reached for something that's not there.

How can Sitehound help in this instance? Sitehound plays nicely with others. Sitehound can bring in the products from your PIMS and the records from your old inventory system; Sitehound can help you work with different vendors based on price, availability, or simply preference; and Sitehound Vet can help you sort your inventory among different locations. When you set up Sitehound, your location is your group of practices (like your family's last name), and then each one of your practices is a sublocation (like your siblings' names), and it allows you to keep creating sublocations down to the bin sitting on the shelf in the exam room at the other ER (like finding something in your sibling's bedroom). If you choose to allow your different siblings to see what's in each other's bedroom, you'll be able to let the sibling know that you took from them because you needed it. This makes your inventory manager's (parent's) job much easier.

Sitehound lets the inventory manager see who took what, from whom, from where, in real time. Sitehound then notifies the inventory manager what needs to be ordered for each location by looking at the inventory history. There will be no surprises come audit day, order day, or even Monday, when the ER vet is prepping for surgery and realizes that over the weekend the vet tranquilizing bears has taken the last of the ketamine.

Sitehound doesn't guess. Sitehound looks at the data in real time and recommends. Sitehound allows vets to play nicely together, creating a non-criminal environment.

See how Sitehound Vet tracks stock by location — from the hospital group down to the bin — and records every transfer with a name on it.