FlexProcess Inventory Management supports the complexities of process manufacturing. It can track all of the inventory, including raw materials, finished goods, intermediates, by-products, etc.. Inventory can be tracked by site, area, location and by unit (e.g. pallet, drum), and managed by lot classifications ,characteristics, expiration dates, and stored in multiple unit of measures.

Increasing the accuracy of inventory management helps to utilize the resources usage and to avoid any miss-consumption/shipment. It also helps to provide auditing evidence for inventory related transactions.

Resources

Resource is used to define anything that goes into or comes out of production (e.g. raw material, equipment. labor, utility, etc.). By defining all production required elements in the system, production planning, scheduling, reporting become more accurate.
There are four types of resources.

Resources Types

Balanced

Items to be tracked in inventory, such as raw materials, packaging materials, intermediates, and products.

Non-Balanced

Items not stored in inventory, such as electricity, gas, steam, etc., but required to track through production.

Scheduling

Items such as machinery, labor, and other capacity resources.

Stream

Items to represent the flow of material from one production model stage to another. They are not inventoried.

Inventory Storage Areas (Sites / Areas / Locations)

Site, Area, Location are used to identify the inventory storage. For example, sites can be defined for plants, and areas for warehouses, and locations for shelves.

This is an example of site / area / location for a plant.

Lot Management

Each resource can be defined whether its lot/sub-lot is tracked.

Lot / sub-lot

Lots can be further divided into sub-lots for detailed tracking.
For example, sub-lots can be assigned by each shift for the same production batch.

Inventory Classification

Classifications specify the inventory status, for example,'QC','FAIL','REWORK', etc. Inventory may go through multiple classifications as you receive, inspect, stock, and reject it.
Classifications can restrict whether the inventory in this classification can be issued to schedules, or to be available to ship.

Lot Characteristics

Characteristics are user-defined properties that provide extra detail, about individual resources. Entries can be made by numeric, alphanumeric, and Boolean, and possible entries can be pre-defined in value tables.

Management of Expiration Dates

Individual lots and sub-lots can be tracked with manufacturing and expiration dates. Expiration date can be user entered when the lot is produced, or can be generated by the system according to the resource inventory control definition.
Inventory can be inquired by specifying the expiration date in order to determine the usage priority of lots.

Multiple Unit of Measures(UM)

Resource-specific Unit of Measure (UM) conversion can be defined, as well as the standard UM conversions (e.g.1kg=1000g), when a resource has a different UM conversion from other resources.
A resource can always be measured and tracked in two different unit of measure (e.g. CASE and KG).
Each inventory lot can have different conversion rates.

Inventory Transactions

In addition to the schedule activities in production management, there are four types of activities to report inventory transactions. When activities are recorded and updated, inventory is updated immediately.

Receiving activity

Report receipts of purchased resources.

Shipping activity

Report shipment of customer orders.

User-defined activity

Report inventory movements, including the issue /receipt through the cost center.

Inventory adjustment activity

Report to adjust the inventory quantity as a result of physical counts, etc.

Traceability

Lot can be tracked from product to raw material or vice versa.
Forward tracking allows tracing through shipment lot, production activity, intermediate lots, raw material consumption, and to the purchase order.
Backward tracking allows tracing in a reverse direction from purchasing order to product shipment.