Inventory Management

The following commentary identifies a number of features that, hopefully, provides a sufficient degree of information for you to identify whether this free resource might be worthy of investigation. If you have any queries that you would like an answer to please send an email and you will receive a response.

Traceability: It is possible to identify the level of monitoring for a product according to three distinct settings. In broad terms of increasingly detailed tracking this ranges from no requirement to monitor any identifiable units of inventory; through a mid-level that monitors according to supply chain source; to the highest level which results in monitoring for an identifiable batch - which may be supply chain identified values, individual receipt or possibly purchase order. The underlying table identifies the related "key" as product code, unit-of-measure, batch identifier and location identifier - the first three being the principal identification for a defined block of inventory and the last providing the ability to store such a block across a number of physical sites.

Data Entry Methods: Various activities (receiving product for a purchase order, shipping items on a sales order, issuing components/raw material to a production order) result in entries being automatically recorded in the audit trail that is relevant to the current inventory position. In addition users are able to record manual entries that permit adjustments to reflect activities such as stock counts (updward and downward adjustments), stock movement between designated locations and conversion between product related unit-of-measure if that applies. It is also possible to identify individual business process inventory activity by the addition of inventory transaction identifiers that are specific to each site.

Audit Trail: Most sites will need to identify an opening inventory position for each product. This would normally be achieved by importing the details of a "stocktake" that has been performed. The details required will reflect the "key" identifiers that are mentioned above plus the related count and an optional associated unit cost value. The latter reflects the ability to effectively manage stock valuation at the level of traceability rather than in relation to an arbitrary product related financial cost - this is a major change for all existing clients using "historic" versions of the software. It is worth noting that those "historic" versions do provide a large degree of flexibility in the choice of product related costs that might be used to establish stock value and this version retains that capacity as the means for valuing inventory.

Paperless: A flexible user defined "linking" feature permits any number of external files (PDF, workbooks, Word documents) to be associated with a batch of inventory. Examples might include quality related certification or any relevant paper based information that might be digitised.