On Jun 10, 2010, at 2:56 AM, John Wenmeekers wrote:

What I have so far to control the inventory is:
+ Initial on hand qty
- inventory transfer
- scrapped qty
- lost/damaged
+ total received
+ total produced
- returned to Vendor
- total consumed
This should give the total inventory on item level.
+ total pending PO
- total pending SO
+ inventory transit
+ total backorder PO
- total backorder SO
This should give the total available on item level.

I think I cover pretty much every possibility (hope)
I think I have to play with dates and some operators within or between the
above fields to end up with a 'yes' or 'no'.

John

The above may or may not be sufficient. That depends on your situation, I guess.

The only comment I would make would be this: don't attempt to calculate all of this on the fly (from initial inventory) every time you need an inventory figure (such as when entering a sales order line item). You will wait while it calculates, and the wait will increase as time goes by and more related records have to be summed.

You need to consolidate transactions into a simple number field at some point so as to limit the number of records of each type of transaction that have to be summed. My preference, for simplicity, was to do the consolidation at the actual moment of the transaction. So for example, as I explained, entry into the database of a sales order would place an option on a certain amount of inventory, and that would be subtracted on the fly (by calculation) from current inventory. At the moment of dispatch, that option on the inventory is exercised and the current inventory figure is adjusted downward.

I think others might suggest a scheduled consolidation process. You'd find, on some regular timetable, all completed transactions and consolidate them all at once into the current inventory field. In FMP5 days, this seemed like overkill for my client's needs. In particular, it would have been difficult to enforce a schedule for consolidation without a plugin or some custom software or suchlike.

HTH

Steve

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