Inventory Control Settings
Vendor
Use this drop-down menu to select which vendor you want to use Inventory Control for. Min/Max, Promo, and Negatives will only be generated for this code.
Min/Max Formula
Min/Max Formula section of the Settings window is very important to both Min/Max and Computer Assisted Ordering. This is where you specify how you want Substruct Utilities to determine when items need reordering.
The Min/Max formula is comprised of three sections: supply level, past sales history, and future sales history. Each of these drop-down menus play an important role in configuring Min/Max to work efficiently.
- Supply Level
This is the amount of time in days or weeks that want to keep on hand. For example: if you sell 3 wrenches every week, and you set this value to “3 Weeks” (3 x 3 = 9), the system will reorder the item every time there are less that 9 in the store. - Past Sales History
This is the amount of time in days or weeks that the system will look back to determine how often you sell this item. Lets say you sell 2 wrenches this week, 4 last week, none the week before last, and 8 the week before that. If you set your “Past Sale History” value to 3 weeks and your week supply is set to “3 Weeks”, the min would be 6 ([2 + 4 + 0] / 3 = 2 per week x 3 weeks = 6). But let’s say you look back 4 weeks in history. The formula would be [2 + 4 + 0 + 6] / 4 = 3 per week x 3 weeks = 9). - Future Sales History
When you set this value to anything more that “0 Days” the system will look back one year ago and use sales history from the upcoming weeks. This is great for figuring mins out for seasonal items! Lets looks at another example: Let’s say that the date is 7/15/05. If you have the formula set to look back 2 weeks and forward 4 weeks the system will look for all items sold between 7/1/05 and 7/15/05, and then combine that with 7/16/04 through 8/13/04. Let’s say you should 4 last week, 2 two weeks ago, and then 2, 4, 5, and then 7 for 7/16/04 through 8/13/04. The formula for a one week minimum would be [4 + 2 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 7] / 6 weeks = 4. Multiply that by your week supply and you get the min!As you can see, if we had just looked back two weeks, we would have a min of only 3, but based on last year at this time, we should really have min of 4!
Note: Keep in mind that this feature will only work if you have sale history for over a year. Set the “Future” value to “0 Days” to disable the feature.
Min/Max Rounding
In the event that the Min/Max formula above generates a fraction, which can happen very frequently, it must be rounded. You can’t exactly order 4.56 hammers! This area is where you set how the system will round. There is also a check box for rounding fractions less that one up to one. This is useful when you have the system set to round down when there is a fraction, but you don’t want to round slow moving items to zero.