Psychic Inventory

The Wikipedia article on carrying cost includes an interesting concept called "psychic stock." While we are all familiar with reorder points and safety stock, psychic stock may be a new concept. In retail, this is best demonstrated by the process of fronting shelves. For those of us who had grocery store jobs in our high school or college past, there are terrible memories of sliding items to the front of the shelf to make the shelves appear full even if the next truck wasn't due for another 2 days.

So how does this apply to wholesale distribution and GP?

One of the worst things you can tell a customer is that you are out of stock of an A item they want to order. Wouldn't it be nice if you could provide your customer service reps the ability to see into the future and determine if the item a customer is requesting will be available even if the current inventory is zero? To accomplish this, Dynamics GP provides you with the Available to Promise or ATP functionality.

Available to Promise looks at existing sales, purchase, and manufacturing orders and determines what will be available when your customer requests delivery. If your customer requests delivery a week from now and you have a PO due tomorrow, your customer service rep can easily see that quantities will be available.

Now for the bad news: First, Available to Promise is only "available" for Advanced Management users. It is not included or available for Business Essentials. Second, the calculation is only as good as the dates on the documents. If you CSRs or your purchasing department accept the current default on documents, ATP will calculate based on those dates. Garbage in, garbage out.

Cross-Docking with GP

Cross-docking is the act of transferring goods directly from an incoming receipt to an outgoing order without putting the stock away. Obviously, cross-docking can improve your inventory turns, reduce material handling costs, and improve customer satisfaction through the quicker delivery of orders.

So how can you cross-dock with Dynamics GP. The first step is to begin using the Backordered Items Received report. This report prints out when a purchasing receipt is posted and lists all the items on the receipt that are backordered on a sales order. This is a step in the right direction but the report has a couple issues:

1. It only prints after the receipt is posted. Many companies do not post receipts until the goods are put away to keep the bin quantities accurate.
2. It is a paper report. Are your receiving people realistically going to print and review a paper report after they post the receipt?

A more proactive approach can be implemented using the purchase order dates discussed in an earlier post. If you know the expected receipt date of an item, you can create a report or smartlist showing items expected in the next few days that are also backordered sales order items. This report or smartlist can be posted daily in the receiving department to alert personnel to cross-docking opportunities.

As I final note, I would suggest that if you do not have some cross-docking opportunities, you are carrying too much inventory. You cannot afford to have everything your customers want in stock at all times. But that is another post…

Dead Stock Walking

So you went through all the trouble of identifying your dead stock, appointed someone to get rid of it, finally got it out of your warehouse and next week a replenishment order for the same dead stock shows up. Its hard to blame the purchasing people since they saw demand and wanted to make sure you were stocking the things that sell. What could you have done better?

In Dynamics GP, there are two safeguards you can use to avoid replenishing dead stock. First, as soon as the item is identified as dead, change the inventory type to discontinued. This will prevent the item from being added to a purchase order and allow you to delete it at year end if desired.
Second, all dead stock sales should be on a separate document type in Sales Order Processing and the line items should have the exceptional demand box checked. This will allow you to easily identify these sales and remove them from any replenishment calculations.

Purchase Order Statuses

Dynamics GP has 6 statuses for purchase orders and purchase order line items:

New - The purchase order has been entered but not released to the vendor. Interestingly, new purchase orders do not update the on order quantity of an item but can be received against.

Released - The purchase order has been entered and released to the vendor. In a throwback to the 1970's, Dynamics GP considers a PO released to the vendor when printed. The printing process updates the on order quantity for the PO line items.

Received - Purchase order line items have been received but not fully invoiced.

Change Order - The purchase order was entered, released, and then changed but has not been re-released. Change order purchase orders can be received against but changes to quantities will not be reflected in the on order amounts until the PO is re-released (printed).

Cancelled - The purchase order has not been fully received or invoiced but no further activity is anticipated. For example, the purchase order was for 100 widgets and 99 have been received and invoiced. The PO would be cancelled if the receipt of the remaining 1 widget was not anticipated.

Closed - All line items on the PO have been received and invoiced or cancelled. These PO's can be removed from the system using the Remove Completed Purchase Orders window.

PO Commitments and Historical Sales Documents

A couple of my clients have experienced an interesting issue lately. Purchase order are tied to sales documents that are already moved to history. This puts the PO in a limbo state where it cannot be closed or cancelled. I don't know for sure the exact sequence of events that causes this but here is how it can be resolved:

1. Delete the records in the SOP60100 table related to the offending PO number. (Standard disclaimer about modifying SQL data applies here. If you are unfamiliar with SQL queries and/or Dynamics GP table structure, please call your partner for assistance.)

2. Reconcile the offending PO number.

3. Edit the PO and change the status to Cancelled.