Negative qty. on Bins

polmann

Does anyone know why negative qty. isn't allowed on bins?
What would the impact be if this check is bypassed?

Best regards
Polmann

davmac1

Bad :!:

MarkHamblin

It's likely not allowed in order to keep NAV in sync with the physical world - i.e., it's physically impossible to have negative inventory in bins, so why would NAV allow it? My guess is that all code related to bins was written with the assumption that a bin would never go negative. Allowing negative inventory in a bin would probably break a lot of the code due to this base assumption - maybe not with errors, but I'll bet you'd get strange behavior.

Probably better to ensure the physical world and virtual world are in sync so that you never have to worry about going negative. Cycle counting is a big help here, or just doing appropriate ad-hoc adjustments when there's a discrepancy is better than allowing the system to go negative.

- Mark

Alex_Chow

Negative quantity is caused by backlog of paperwork that's not entered yet.

When WMS is properly implemented, you should never have negative quantity in any bins. You have to align your operation process on what's actually happening in your business operation. I.e., when you receive something from the UPS guy, you receive it in the system.

Negative inventory occurs when that paperwork is given to the "stack" of paper for accounting to enter when they get some free time.

polmann

Thanks for the replies. I’m aware that negative qty. in theory doesn’t exist since you can’t sell something which you don’t have. But it’s a question of how the given item is used. In our case the item is a consumption item e.g. water, electricity or something similar. Normally this would be handled by using a resource, but due to the existing functionality that we have this isn’t a possibility.

When you look at the inventory setup, there is a specific option that allows negative qty. on stock, which is why I thought that it would apply for bins as well. I don’t really see why bins should be excluded from this?

I would prefer that the process is changed, but at the moment it unfortunately isn’t possible.

ara3n

Instead I would make a mod to check inventory before posting consumption for those item and if it goes negative, is to post do positive warehouse entry.

MarkHamblin

In our case the item is a consumption item e.g. water, electricity or something similar.

I would avoid using inventory items to represent something other than inventory (though sometimes it's useful). In this case, the best approach is to use a work center to capture the costs and usage for electricity, etc.

If you need to capture the costs by quantity instead of time, change the "Unit Cost Calculation" field on the work center to "quantity". If you want to specify different costs per routing, set "Specific Unit Cost" - this lets you override the unit cost of the work center at the operation level (something you can't do with items).

- Mark

Alex_Chow

MarkHamblin wrote:

In our case the item is a consumption item e.g. water, electricity or something similar.

I would avoid using inventory items to represent something other than inventory (though sometimes it's useful). In this case, the best approach is to use a work center to capture the costs and usage for electricity, etc.

If you need to capture the costs by quantity instead of time, change the "Unit Cost Calculation" field on the work center to "quantity". If you want to specify different costs per routing, set "Specific Unit Cost" - this lets you override the unit cost of the work center at the operation level (something you can't do with items).

- Mark

This. :thumbsup: