Inventory methods applicable for crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is becoming more widely used across the globe in different business operations. This trend opens an opportunity to service provider companies to leverage from the demand to run crowd-based projects. More businesses each year are looking for service providers who have access to crowd contributors and can help them to execute crowd-based projects. The key to success for service providers is to have access to large pools of crowd contributors via internal databases. When talking about crowdsourcing and crowdsourcing databases, the discussion is about big volume data. The numbers of resources in the databases are in hundreds of thousands. To be efficient and achieve best possible outcome when executing crowd-based projects, databases need to be managed and inventories of resources (crowd contributors) to be maintained. The object of this research is to understand which one of standard inventory methods can be applicable to maintain crowdsourcing databases. This research presents why inventories of crowdsourcing databases are important and where that knowledge can be used in practice when working on crowd-based project. The research examines how that knowledge impacts everyday tasks and decision making by sourcing team leads, who oversee, maintain, and manage pools of crowd contributors. The analyses are carried out for what type of data is needed from the inventory and what sourcing leads` tasks can be completed by using that data. Focus group discussions and structured interviews were used to answer research questions. Research participants were sourcing team leads who have the most knowledge of the processes on how crowdsourcing works and how crowd contributors get engaged in the projects. All research findings where organised and analysed. Where applicable results were organised in charts and tables for visual presentation. As conclusion it was presented that based on the research finding perpetual inventory method was found to be most suitable for crowdsourcing databases. To understand the full benefits of implementing perpetual inventory method to maintain crowdsourcing databases it was suggested to conduct further research to examine financial impact for the business