Inventory Management
Competitiveness requires dramatic improvements in the management of inventories. The Vanguard Inventory Management application has the tools to support those improvements. JIT and Kanban techniques are common. You can reduce inventory investment and cut inventory costs: reduce obsolescence, carrying costs, expediting costs and ordering and handling costs. Improved inventory and work-in-process (WIP) accuracy, provided by our physical and cycle counting systems, can improve customer service levels and reduce excess transportation costs. Auditors will be pleased with the comprehensive built-in controls, and inventory control managers will like the automation, the ease-of-use features, and the on-line information capabilities.
Key benefits of Inventory Management
- Optimize inventory investment by minimizing the related carrying, ordering and shortage costs
- Maintain accurate, real-time perpetual inventory values
- Easy-to-use tools, with automated controls
- Automated inventory transactions are supported by table-driven defaults for validation and accounting
- Improve quality assessments using engineering change notice tools
- ‘Cradle to the grave’ lot traceability
- Improve profit margins by tracking sales and cost-of-sales by item and warehouse
- Reduce customer expediting cost
- On-line planning capability, including available-to-promise
- Distribution management support for warehouse replenishment
- Automated booking to the General Ledger by product line, warehouse, customer, and cost category, including labor, material, machine and overhead costs
Key features of Inventory Management
- Inventory balances by plant, warehouse, stock location and lot
- On-line visibility of on-hand and work-in-process balances with drill-down to stock
location and lot and transaction history - Visibility of WIP by item and pay-point (and optionally by lot and work order)
- Business rules for each item are established by location: an item may be manufactured
in one location and a ‘buy’ item in another-with appropriate rules and defaults by location - Lot control for vendor lot and internal item/lot through the manufacturing process,
traceable to shippers-with on-line or hard-copy traceability - Multiple methods of costing and valuing inventory, including current standard,
frozen standard, rolling average, and last actual cost - Flexibility is provided through user-defined inventory transactions-which define the
transaction’s affected inventory fields and the related accounting transactions - Complete on-line audit trail with unlimited history of all transactions
- ABC inventory control methods to assist in managing high-value, high-volume items
- Physical inventory tools include tag control, count items, reconciliation and adjustments
- Cycle counting supports four methods to select items to count, ABC classification,
warehouse/stock locations, random, and zero/negative on-hand - Cycle counting supports freeze/unfreeze-which allows you to continue plant and
warehouse activity during the counts - Visibility of in-transit inventory
- Optional soft allocation of inventory to orders and hard allocation for pick lists
- Inter-warehouse transfer system provides control, automated replenishment rules,
and in-transit visibility of inbound inventory - Inter-warehouse transfers booked at cost or cost-plus or selling price
- Unlimited item analysis provided using item group codes
- Complete statistical analysis of financial and physical inventory data