Automate Inventory Management

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You probably know that Standard Time is a time tracking application and you can barcode projects, tasks, work orders on the shop floor. Did you also know that you can barcode inventory and bill of materials and deduct from quantity in stock? Let’s take a look at how it works.

Let’s start by going into tools, inventory and bill of materials to see what you can scan to automatically deduct from inventory. It turns out that all of these inventory items are scannable. The names you see over here on the right hand side can be set up on barcode labels. You can scan them to automatically deduct from inventory. Same is true with the bill of materials; if you were to scan panel assembly that would deduct all of the items from inventory in this entire bill of materials.

Let’s switch over to Microsoft Word where we can actually see the labels that would be printed out and scanned on the shop floor. We’ve got a simple name of bill of materials, you recognize the panel assembly. I’m going to remove this front, go back to a normal text font, you can see there is real no magic here.

You’ve got the asterisk before and after which is normally necessary for most barcodes. In this case we have an equal’s character to substitute for the space. This is the name of the bill of materials that we saw over at Standard Time or an inventory item. Here we’re actually adding 100 of these items back into inventory. Adding 200 panel assemblies and down here we’re subtracting 5 of these in 7 panel assemblies. You can add and subtract using this special notation with the dashes and quantity. Let’s undo you can see then the normal font that we would use for printing out barcode labels. Print those out and scan those on the shop floor or the receiving dock.

Back to Standard Time, we’ll go back into tools, inventory. It turns out you can scan more than just the name. You may remember that pn1 from the barcode label. Turns out you can scan the name or the SKU or a code or a part number. You can scan the vendor SKU or the manufacturer SKU. If you already have these barcodes printed on boxes, coming in off the receiving dock, you can then scan those put them back into inventory. And that would affect the quantity in stock whether we’re subtracting or adding.

When the quantity in stock drops below the reorder quantity this will kick off a script to automatically reorder those items; or replenish if you’re building them in-house. Now that’s a topic of another video but that is a way to automatically reorder or replenish those items.

When we’re in the bill of materials you’ll notice bill of materials do not have quantities. Instead each of the items in the bill of materials has a quantity. In this case we have two wood panels, 24 nuts, 35 screws and 12 weldment assemblies. When you scan the panel assembly bill of materials you’re actually deducting all of these items in this quantity from inventory.
Go ahead and set up your barcodes and begin scanning inventory items in addition to the time tracking that you get in Standard Time.

See more at: http://www.stdtime.com


Read more on our website: http://www.stdtime.com/blog/automate-inventory-management.htm

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