Inventory That Manages Itself

00:02we see a lot of different challenges when it comes to inventory and a lot of our customers are you know consistently facing these challenges and looking to find Solutions and to further automate their process in order to kind of overcome some of those challenges you know here we're talking a little bit about um things like having too much inventory or the wrong inventory on hand um also you know in an insufficient inventory to fill our orders so what we're really what we're really talking about here is the ability to have the right material in the right place at the right time and a lot of times that's really what it comes down to when our customers can't are having problems you know getting inventory in that right location in the right location um when we have that you know the situation really what comes you know what the real challenge becomes is that customer satisfaction level and that fill rate that

00:56we're looking for so if we um you know if we're constantly struggling with inventory we're constantly Expediting then we're going to have um you know Rush shipments we're gonna have you know further Expediting um and ultimately with the increase in landed costs and the increase in shipping costs we're going to start to affect cogs uh negatively so um you know the real value that we have in in optimizing our our inventory management process is to really reduce those stock out to increase customer satisfaction and so today we're going to talk about a few different features within netsuite that we can utilize to optimize our inventory levels and to make sure we have the visibility we need across our organization so we're going to step over into netsuite here and we're going to take a look at some of the inventory items and features that I set up to talk about multi-location inventory

01:52we're going to talk about the ability to trace inventory through the process we'll talk a little bit about cycle counting and then finally we'll talk about replenishing inventory using our reorder Point features and how those work so this is an assembly that we have here for a circuit board a couple of things that I want to point out on this circuit board first of all is our bill of material functionality it's very important to understand here that for our bill of materials we can have multiple bills of material and then within those bombs we can have multiple revisions with effectivity dates tied to those and then the last thing I want to point out here is that you have the ability to set a default bomb but if you're in a multi-location environment we also have the ability to set a default for a specific location so you'll notice here I have a bill of material for Denver and I have it defaulted here for Denver

02:42and then for all my other locations within my network I have a master default bond that we would use this is really helpful if we have different Supply types in different locations and this also allows us to support multiple bombs for things like engineering bombs and costing bombs as well if I click over here on my purchasing an inventory tab I'm going to be able to take a look at my entire network that I have set up as far as inventory goes you'll see this item in particular is only held at my Denver location and my OKC location and I'm able to quickly look and see you know what I have on hand what the value and the cost is of that inventory that's on hand a few other things I want to point out are our inventory um our inventory planning parameters here what you'll notice is I have the ability to set up build point or reorder point for this item and I can also set a preferred stock level so

03:39this is like an order up to quantity for my item in addition to that I can set the lead time for my vendor at the location level as well as my safety stock and the reason I'm going through this is the important thing to understand here is that these are set at the location level so I'm able to have different values for different locations and I'm also able to manage inventory independently by location utilizing this location configuration so in addition to that replenishment information I also have the ability to set up my cycle count information here at the assembly level and what you'll notice here is that I have a column here for my next count date that I can manually set if I'd like to and then I have account interval so these are a items for me and I want to count them every 15 days in this example you could have uh C or D items or you could have B or C items as

04:39well and you can set the count interval independently for your items and for your locations and what happens when we when we process a cycle count is that the next count date gets reset based on the day that we count this for a a date in the future incremented by that count interval so if we counted this today then we would have another account scheduled for 15 days from now now let's talk about traceability we do have the ability within netsuite to have as an example here this is a lot numbered assembly we have the ability to have lot numbered inventory items and we have the ability to trace inventory back through the process so to do that I'm going to go in to my report screen here and I'm going to pull up a lot Trace report and I'm going to select a lot that I want to trace we'll trace this one and I'm going to set this up by my location or my subsidiary here for the USA and

05:55I'm going to do a backward Trace okay so I'm I know uh that this lot is something that we built and sold and I want to go backwards and see what all went into this particular Lot number so to do that I'll hit submit and you'll notice as the page begins to load here I can start to see uh some very some different information about this particular lot the first thing I'll point out here is I can see what my current total quantity on hand is and then I can also see what my outbound total quantity is so this is how much have I already shipped um out for this item so right here on my inbound tab I can see that here's the assembly that I built this inventory on and if I want to understand what was inside of that assembly I can expand this I had one lock controlled item that went into that this was our our solder and then here if I drill even deeper into this solder

06:54I'm able to see what was the lot number of the solder that went into this Lot number and what quantity did I buy it in and which purchase order did it come in on so I'm able to see exactly which vendor which purchase order which receipt what day I received that and then now I could go if there was a problem with this item I could go back and I could do a forward trace on this item to see if it went to any other customers as well maybe in a different assembly on the outbound side if I want to see the customers that were affected here we see that this Lot number was fulfilled to this customer on this sales order and on this date and so this will really help us especially if we had multiple customers getting the same lot we would see that entire list here I can take this information now that I have it I can export it all so I can do further analysis if I want to and then like I said now that

07:46I've done a backward Trace to find out where this went if I wanted to take specific components I could go and use those lots so this Lot number here and do a forward Trace if I'd like to excuse me visibility across and traceability across my supply chain just to make sure that if I have regulatory requirements or if I have the potential for recalls that that might need to be notified to the to the vendor Downstream then if uh as those types of things happen this tool really helps us to be able to get a complete picture of our lot controlled in inventory in addition to the lot Trace we also have serial Trace capabilities as well if you're using serialized inventory now I'd like to walk you through the cycle counting process so in order to create and process a cycle count we're going to go to transactions we'll go to inventory and

08:41we'll do create inventory count and to create inventory account screen is going to allow us to filter in on our correct subsidiary and location we can select a date range where we want to look for count dates that are available and here you see a list of different items then that need to be counted and when they need to be counted okay based on that count date we set at the item location level on the item master so we can see we got different dates here from um 9-1 out to even 10 1 in this case if this item has been counted before you'll see a last count date like we see here and in addition to that any of that classification information that we set up at the item Master Level for this location is also going to show here the nice thing about that is that's going to allow me to filter down so if I only want to count a items a day I can select that classification I can select just the B item if I'd like to or I can leave it blank and I can count everything that needs to be counted so

09:46I'm going to go ahead and get ahead of the game here and let's go ahead and create account for this item and this item I will put in my inventory variance account here and I also have the option to uh count bins with zero quantity so if I have bins and I'm going to go ahead and count maybe I would have the potential to find something in a in a different bin I can have those listed out if they're associated with the item I'll go ahead and submit this inventory account so now I have an open count and it's sitting out here and it has the different items and the different bins that they exist in okay now currently this count is out there it has not been started yet we do want to make sure that when we're counting inventory that we have a good snapshot that's created so to do that once you're ready to go out and do the inventory count we recommend that that's when you go ahead and start the count and when I start that count

10:51it's going to go out and it's going to grab a snapshot of what inventory is in place and then it's going to use that snapshot to compare against what we actually count so for the user that's going to actually do the count what we can do is actually print account sheet for them to go out and use to collect their data so to do that we're going to go to transactions inventory and print inventory count sheet we'll select our subsidiary and our location and then we'll find the count here's the one for Denver that we just created and we'll go ahead and print that count sheet that's going to put this count sheet in a status screen and here I can view the link to the file foreign so as we talked about earlier here's a good count sheet now this now the inventory control person can take this information go out onto the shop floor and do their accounts

12:12and then maybe bring it back to a kiosk and enter that information themselves or give it to somebody to enter when I enter that account all I have to do is go into the inventory account edit it and once I'm in edit mode I'll go ahead and enter the count that I counted I'll hit OK and I'll go ahead and save that inventory account if I'm done entering the quantities I can hit complete count now this process based on the status is completely controlled by our permissions under our roles so typically the person that's entering the account and approving account is not the uh is not the same person that's going to approve of the account and post the adjustments so you'll see here we did have some adjusted quantities we had some variances that are that were created here and that's based on the comparison from the snapshot quantity versus what I counted and here's what the adjustment looks like so this gives us the ability to preview what our adjustment is going to look like

13:22and then the person doing the approving can either reject that and have them recount or they can approve it which would go out and would create the inventory uh adjustment quickly processing this inventory account once again will then update the last counted date and repopulate the next count date based on the interval we supplied at the inventory item level so next let's talk about inventory replenishment once again we set our inventory replenishment levels our build points and our buy points on the inventory items and the assemblies and in order to see what that looks like I can go into transactions manufacturing and mass create work orders I'll open that in a new tab as well as transactions purchases order items so here on the mass create work order screen we have two tabs time phase which is our MRP uh Supply planning functionality that you could utilize or reorder point which is part of our Advanced inventory functionality and here you'll see it uh you'll

14:36actually see the same item the circuit board that we were looking at but for both locations I can see what I have available what I have on order what I set as my build point and what I said is my preferred stock level in addition to that it's calculated a quantity that it's going to recommend that I build here in this case 31. if I'm okay with that I can select the items that I want to go ahead and create Workforce for I can change the quantities here if I would like to I'll go ahead and change this quantity and then if uh if these are the items that I want to go ahead and create Workhorse for all I have to do is hit submit and the system will go out and automatically create those work orders in the background the cues up a process here and then I can monitor it once the it goes into complete I'll be able to look at those two work orders now purchasing works exactly the same way this on this order item screen we have uh again a couple of different tabs the time phase tab as well as the reorder Point tab and here you'll notice here's some components I've also got uh both locations here uh supported on this screen I can even filter that down if I would like to I can see who the vendor is for all of these components I can find uh

15:51and then I can start to look at all of the different quantities so I can see what my available quantity is how much is on back order how much I have on a current Po and then now my reorder point and my preferred stocking levels and how I've calculated the quantities here in order to order if I like what I see here I'm able to select all of these at one time I can selectively select which ones and once again I can change the quantities that I want to add to these purchase orders so once I'm happy with that from a purchasing standpoint I'm going to go ahead and just select a couple of these we'll do uh these two and we'll submit this so just like the work orders now it's going to go out it's going to give me a process screen and it's going to allow me to to see when that purchase order gets created

16:42I'm going to refresh the work order screen and just kind of give you an idea of what this ends up looking like here's what this completed it process two work orders one for Denver one for OKC and here's the work order numbers if I wanted to go out and review them or release them the same way with the purchasing side I'll refresh this it's still working now it's in progress and soon it'll complete and we'll have the purchase order that we need in order to buy those components so there's our Po and I can easily go in and send that off to the to the vendor and make sure that I have a good date for when that inventory is coming back in so thanks for the time today this really was I wanted to show you some of the tools that we have with just core Inventory management within netsuite to manage your replenishment to manage your cycle counting as well as Trace inventory uh from the start of the process when

17:41it's received in the door all the way through manufacturing and out the door to customers so that we can get that um that that smooth traceability so that we know if something were to happen we'd be able to identify quickly all of the affected products within the supply chain