Inventory Management

The ability to deliver the right product to the right place at the right time is the core of your business. Inventory is one of the largest investments a company makes. Ensuring that you have enough of the right product in stock, while avoiding stockouts and overstocks is a daily challenge. You are responsible for reducing investment in inventory and increasing inventory turns. Accomplish this with Macola ES’s Inventory Management (I/M) module, the core of your distribution system.

Important advantages of Inventory Management are:

• Manages item specifications and stock levels
• Management of cycle and physical counting
• Multiple warehouse support
• Support a multi-bin system
• Serial/Lot traceability from raw materials to finished product
• Item/document note system
• Auto create purchase orders for reorder point items
• Macola Bar Code and EDI integration

I/M provides you with the tools to effectively manage and analyze your inventory. Sales and cost analysis, ABC analysis, obsolete inventory tracking, physical and cycle count features with trend accuracy analysis are just a few of the features that will enable you to maximize inventory turns while eliminating shortages and excess inventory investment.

Easy tracking of detailed inventory data
Macola ES’s distribution and manufacturing functions maintain information unique to each item that provides the system with essential information on how to purchase, sell, and manufacture the item. Maintain planned, current, or obsolete items through I/M’s status code. Identify items as purchased or manufactured. Maintain control levels and indicate if item quantities should be automatically allocated when sales or usage requests are placed through other Macola ES packages.

Item data is nicely organized into meaningful groups with access to other item related information like customer item, vendor item, substitute and more.

Track items down to the location
You also have the ability to create the different inventory locations that your company uses. Those locations are used throughout both the Macola ES distribution and manufacturing suites.

Macola ES's I/M also allows you to maintain inventory which is stocked in multiple locations, including the on-hand, on-order, allocated, and back ordered quantities, along with price, cost, and sales/usage information. This allows for the same item at different locations to have different values assigned, such as reorder levels, mins, maxes, and primary vendors.

Streamlined physical count processes
The ability to conduct a full physical count is very important to ensure that system inventory balances accurately reflect the actual quantity. Macola ES allows you to conduct physical or cycle count while you continue with your daily business activities. I/M allows the user to flexibly select locations for counting, generating count tags and extra tags. Multiple reports facilitate the reconciliation process, including the Counts By Tag Report, Missing Inventory Report and the Variance Report. The Count Accuracy and Trend Accuracy reports allow you to determine the success of materials management improvement programs you have put into place.

Stock in Multiple Bins Within One Location
You can create and maintain multiple bins within a location. I/M allows multiple items to reside in the same bin and also allows the same item to reside in multiple bins within a location. You can also define the physical limitations of a bin’s space by specifying a bin maximum based on quantity, weight, or volume. Priority-based putaway and allocation logic allows the system to make recommendations automatically during transaction processing, reducing manual transactions.

Track inventory by serial numbers or lots
One of the exciting features of I/M is the commitment to FDA regulated industries and others requiring item traceability down to the serial or lot level. Some of the features include the ability to define separate serial and lot formats and numbering conventions, hard and soft allocation with multiple allocations methods, complete upwards and downwards traceability via inquiry with Macola ES’s Visual Serial/Lot Trace. You can trace an item from receipt through production all the way to the end product or customer.

One-touch access to all inventory information
I/M’s multi-level drill down inquiry allows you to inquire into inventory balances, open purchase orders, open sales orders, and transaction history at any point in time. Quickly and easily find the quantity of any inventory item which is on-hand, allocated, or on order. Additionally, you can see a list of all customer orders for an item and view the order’s header and item information down to the serial, lot, and bin level. You can also see a list of all open purchase orders for this item and look up item specific information.

Set expectations accurately with available-to-promise
One of the keys to providing good customer service is to be able to tell your customers when they can expect their order to arrive. In order to provide this information you usually must check different areas, what inventory has already been allocated to other customers, and when you expect replenishments. This can be in the form of a purchase order for purchased items or a production order for items that you produce.

I/M provides you with one simple to use inquiry that takes requirements and replenishments and nets out your available-to-promise for any given period. The periods can be defined as you see fit. This inquiry will allow you to identify what stock you have on-hand or are expecting to promise to your valued clients.