Dimensions with Physical Inventory

Mauddib

We use Dimensions on our system 3.70.B We have Dimensions set as mandatory.

This has implications when you do Physical Inventory Journals which are causing me trouble. When you do a Physical Inventory Journal --> Calculate inventory... all the items come up with the Dimension Code NOT filled in, which takes ages to do manually.

If however when doing the 'calculate inventory' you turn on the "By Dimensions" option it fills in the dimensions. But it does it badly as some of our raw materials are used in items with different Dimensions. Example follows:

We use Dextrose with Dimension DEXT in making gum balls with Dimension HLLW. If we start with 20unit of this and use 2 of it in making the gum ball...... then we do Calulate inventory... What you expect would be:

R7250000 Dextrose DEXT 18

What you get is:

R7250000 Dextrose DEXT 20
R7250000 Dextrose HLLW -2

So to enter the count of R7250006 of, say, 17 I have to set the first line to 17 and the next line to 0.

When you take into account that we make 30 different Gum balls PER DAY, you can see this is also a pain in the neck.

Any workarounds out there?

GaMBe

jreynolds

First of all you can't really use base a physical count on dimensions. This is because Navision does not look at dimensions when applying a negative item ledger entry to a positive one. When applying one item ledger entry to another Navision only requires that item number, location, and variant (lot and serial too if you are using item tracking) match. Therefore it is possible to receive an item with a dimension value of 'X' and have that entry applied against a entry with a dimension value of 'Y'.

That being said it is still reasonable to do a physical count and expect that the item's default dimensions get applied to the item journal lines that are created. In the InsertItemJnlLine function in report 790 (Calculate Inventory) the item number on the item journal line is validated which will attach the item's default dimensions to the item journal line. Unfortunately, a little bit later in that function those dimensions are deleted and replaced by only those dimensions that are specified on the option tab of the report request form. It's a pretty easy matter to change this logic to keep the default dimensions.

Lighthouse

I know that this is an old topic but I have a customer querying why the default dimensions on the Item are not being filled in when Calculating Inventory and this is just a note for anyone who comes across this issue in the future. I have spent some time going through the code and like jreynolds says, the item validates, filling in the dimensions and then it clears the two global dimensions.

I also understand that applications will be an issue if you need to report by dimension ... it may not make sense, however if I calculate inventory and then fill in the Dimensions, it posts fine.

I am going to update the code in the inventory count to include those dimensions but only when NOT using the "By Dimensions" option (this option fills in the Dims if selected on the report) on the report and I will keep you posted as to the findings. I know that one issue will be like for my customer they did not originally use dimensions on items and so the ILE will not have any dimensions, and now they want to and so if they had started using dimensions from the start they could use the "By Dimensions" and then this would not be an issue.

Like I said previously, I will keep you posted on the findings :-k

Lighthouse

So I finished doing some investigation into this and here is my reasoning which may help someone in the future.

One thing to understand is when you run the physical inventory count, you either do it by dimension or not. If you don’t run it by dimension, it is set to NOT record the dimensions in the Item Journal Line.

A physical count looks at ledger entries already in the system and then populates the journal. If the ledger entries contain dimensions on them, and you run the calculate inventory by dimension, then it will populate the dimensions, however if the Item ledger does not have any dimensions attached then when running by dimension, it will populate blank.

Making the change as I suggested in my previous post to populate the dimensions from the Item when running the Inventory Count without the "By Dimension" option may not be the best solution as we are bypassing what is already stored on the Item Ledger to cater for what is on the Item. So for example if the Item ledger has dimension 1 on it, but the Item card is set to 2, the physical count will set the dimension to 2 and post a positive or negative adjustment with 2 on it and cause an imbalance by dimension especially when it comes to applications.

What may be a better option is to start using the default dimensions on the Item Card or set dimension rules on stock items to populate the purchases, sales and other movements and then there will come a time when old stock with no dimensions is cleared out and new stock has dimensions and we can then run the count by dimension.

Hopefully this helps!

JamieHurst

Lighthouse wrote:

Hopefully this helps!

Thanks very much! I'm heading down the same road and your comments are extremely helpful.