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 Progression's Inventory Management (I/M) module. 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

The Item File is the most important file in all of Progression's distribution and manufacturing functions. It maintains 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 orders are placed through Progression's Order Entry (O/E) package. You also have the option to define non-stocked and non-controlled “phantom” items.

Flexible Kit Building

If your company assembles and distributes products from components, Progression's I/M can accommodate those needs. The Kit File Maintenance application within I/M gives you some of the advantages of a Bill of Material package without the expense or complexity. The Sales Kitting function enables you to enter a kit item number, component items, and quantity per kit for each component. There is also flexibility within the Kit File Maintenance application to calculate costs and price as well as easily update kit items cost and price in the Item File. Additionally, this application will also allow you to process the sale of kits in Progression's O/E package.

Track Items Down to the Location

The Inventory Location Maintenance application allows you to create the different inventory locations that your company uses. Those locations are used throughout both the Progression distribution and manufacturing suites. Progression’s Version 7.6 I/M also allows you to maintain inventory which is stocked at more than one location, 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.

Stock in Multiple Locations Within One Warehouse

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.

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 through the Multiple Level Item View application. For even more detailed information, you can click a button to see a list of all customer orders for an item. You can then select an order and drill down to that order's header and line item information down to the serial, lot, and bin level. You can also click a button and see a list of all open purchase orders for this item. Click another button and go directly to the Item Location File to 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 that inventory has ready been allocated to other customers, and when do 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 into effect requirements, 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 exactly stock you have on-hand or are expecting to promise to your valued clients.

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 Progression's Visual Serial/Lot Trace.** You can trace an item from receipt through production all the way to the end product or customer.

Streamlined Physical Count Processes

Whether using cycle counting or not, the ability to conduct a full physical count is very important to ensure that system inventory balances accurately reflect the actual quantity. 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 Count 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.